Because my Titanic era pressure gauge isn’t working. {{shiver}}
Winter has come upon us,
Cried the Pipers of Shalot!
And the house is cold.
Ground floor is okay, but the upper floor is cold.
Boiler guy came today to try to fix it. I took him down cellar to the boiler.
He broke out laughing.
La Maison Piper is sort of old. Like, close to a century.
And the boiler, original to the house, was initially designed to burn coal. Then it was adapted to heating oil. More recently ( like maybe 30 years ago), it has been adapted to natural gas.
“I think there’s a problem with your pressure gauge” he said, pointing to an old analog needle gauge that Jack Dawson would likely have thought the height of modern tech. “It needs to be at least 20 psi to get the water up two stories, and it’s showing 10 psi. But I’ll see what I can do.”
A few hours later, he advised that he thinks it’s a combination of the old gauge, probably close to a century old, and a new pump that is probably only a couple of decades old. He’ll do some googling over the weekend and see if the new(ish) pump can be replaced, and a new gauge installed.
It may be a long cold winter Chez Pipers, especially with the early snow. (See location.)
My only hope is that Justin Trudeau implements cheap loans for environmentally friendly retro-fittings!
Our family was never more bitter sweet happy when the inspector condemned our original to the house coal furnace. No more smelly coal fire fumes, no more filling the stoker multiple times a day and emptying the clinkers and lugging them out to the alley. But also no more gentle steady constant warmth from the vents even when it wasn’t actively running
How can a bad gauge cause a pressure problem? If the gauge is wrong, and you have 20psi, and it’s only reading 10psi, then you would still have heat. If the gauge is right, and it’s reading 10psi correctly, it’s a pump (or some other) problem.
I don’t see how a bad gauge could cause a problem.
I’m feeling a bit confused, myself. I have the self-same heating system, though my house is a mere 93 years old. Coal boiler with natural gas burner retrofit. Circulation pump on a hot water rad loop. No second floor, though. The pressure gauge on the boiler doesn’t really have anything to do with how much zip the pump is putting into the water, at least so far as I know. It goes up and down a bit with how hot the water, and by extension the air pockets in the radiators, are. The pumping pressure of the pump doesn’t register on that gauge, again at least so far as I know. That pressure gauge shows the same regardless of whether the pump is running or not. The only real relevance of the pressure registering on that gauge is whether you have enough pressure to bleed any air out of the rads using the little bleeder valves at the top of said rads. There will also be an overpressure safety valve somewhere, probably right next to the boiler, that will squirt hot water out if it goes much over 10psi because the system isn’t designed to contain significant static pressure. Mine dumps into a plastic jack-o-lantern that came with the house, and will do so if I leave open the make-up valve that adds water to the system from the output of the hot water tank, as city pressure is around 40psi.
It’s still a distinct possibility that the pump is the issue, but there could also be something impeding the flow of water to the upper floor. The gauge, not so much.
Actually, thinking about this just slightly more, I don’t think the pump is at issue either. Frankly, there are systems like these that run without any pumps at all, just using convection. Hot water goes up, cold water comes down. My grandmother’s house used to work that way. Light a fire, a couple hours later it’s warm upstairs. I think either something is impeding the flow of water to the upstairs rads, or possibly the system hasn’t been bled in so long that there isn’t any water in the upstairs rads. Step 1, bleed the rads. PM me for my phone number if you want further instructions.
The upstairs being cold was the problem we had years ago, when I was a child in my parents’ house; and bleeding the rads was the solution. Worth a try, before you run up any more bills for service and parts.
This is bugging me more and more. Your guy is thinking like a plumber (which isn’t unreasonable, as he probably is a plumber). You need 20psi to get water to the second floor if you want it to come out of a faucet. You don’t need 20psi to get water to the second floor in a closed system, since the weight of the water going up to the second floor is counterbalanced by the weight of the water coming back down on the return loop.
I’d agree with this. I’m in a three story 100 year old house, albeit with a modern (12 year old) boiler. We have three zones with separate circulating pumps and I run between 16 and 20 PSI. There is a concept of static head vs dynamic head when you have a closed loop pump driven system and you just need enough pressure to push the water up and gravity does the rest.