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I grew up in Hicksville, Long Island (don’t laugh!) and I spent a good part of Junior and Senior High School sharing a classroom with Billy Joel, and that is my single brush with musical fame. I clearly remember sitting next to him in
In a Manhattan co-op apartment building, where the local time, mechanically speaking, is 1949, Screwdriver Willie is doing his very best to keep the tenants warm and happy while trying to maintain his own sanity. His tool of choice for this monumental task is, of course, the screwdriver.
When I was 20 years old I took a job working for a manufacturer’s rep. My father was my boss and since we were the first father/son combination ever to show up at this company he was especially hard on me. He didn’t want anyone to think I was being favored. We were the representatives for the
If you ask a dozen people what the proper operating pressure for a steam system is, you’ll probably get a dozen different answers. Most folks just follow “what they were taught” without giving much thought to the results. You see most steam systems run at ridiculously high pressures.
The building management agent looked at me the way a cop would look at a con man. “You can’t tell me how much we’re going to save?” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “We should spend all this money and go to all this trouble without knowing the payback?” He shook his head again. “This is not something I can sell to the board,” he said finally, and we left it
If you’re working with folks who are rich, cold, and miserable there’s a good chance they’ll be living in big 19th Century homes that have heating systems of the indirect variety. These can be as confusing as adolescence so I thought I’d tell you what I’ve learned of them so far
When you look in a boiler manufacturer’s catalog you’ll see that there are several types of ratings for each boiler. There’s the Input rating, the Gross Output rating (which some call the D.O.E. Heating Capacity) and then there’s the Net Output rating. You pick one or another to size a boiler. But are you sure you picked the right one?
Billy was having a bad day. Mario the Baker had called him first thing that morning to say he was going to drive to Billy’s office and punch him in the face. It seems that Mario the Baker’s steam boiler had just spit about ten gallons of dirty boiler water into the oven along with the steam. That, of course, ruined the rolls, and
Bell & Gossett sells a special fitting called the Monoflo tee. You’ll find these in thousands of heating systems, and they’ve been there for decades. If you ever have to move pipes around within one of these systems here are a few tips that should save you some time.
Mike always wrote his initials on the pipes with a wax crayon. Next to his initials, he wrote the date and next to the date he drew an arrow that pointed toward heaven. He didn’t write on all the pipes, just the one’s that he himself had welded. It didn’t matter that the other trades would soon bury his pipes behind the walls and beneath the ceilings. Mike knew what he had done, and he knew that it would be there forever.
I have a lot of old engineering books. They’re all weathered and worn and the pages come apart in my hands if I’m not careful. They smell like they’ve traveled all over the world. I could sit here for hours and just look at them. I often
Here are some tips that I thought you might want to file away somewhere for the next time you encounter an old steam heating boiler. Base the size of the replacement boiler on the connected load, not the building’s heat loss. The boiler’s ability to produce steam must match the system’s ability to condense steam
Over the years, I’ve written articles about hydronic systems for Old-House Journal magazine. It’s mostly homeowners who read OJH, folks who are involved with restoring beautiful old Victorian money pits. OHJ readers never throw away that magazine
If you’re a contractor, you may use this (with whatever additions or deletions you’d like) as part of your proposal when you visit with a potential customer. Who knows? It just might help you land the job!
There are some things you can’t help but notice about Denmark. They have windmills, but not of the Don Quixote sort. No, these are huge, three-bladed, high-tech monsters that whoop in a wind that never seems to stop blowing across this low-lying land. You can spot these graceful behemoths from miles away. The people of Denmark turn the wind into light
A Hartford Loop is an arrangement of piping between a steam boiler’s header and its gravity-return piping. The end of the header drops vertically below the boiler’s waterline and connects into the bottom of the boiler. We call this pipe the “equalizer” because it balances the pressure between the boiler’s steam outlet and condensate-return inlet
The couple had lived in the old Victorian for five years and it was their hobby as well as their home. They’d been restoring it and they didn’t want to part with the old one-pipe steam system, but it had been acting up lately
Billy was having a bad day. Mario the Baker had called him first thing that morning to say he was going to drive to Billy’s office and punch him in the face. It seems that Mario the Baker’s steam boiler had just spit about ten gallons of dirty
When you look in a boiler manufacturer’s catalog you’ll see that there are several types of ratingsfor each boiler. There’s the Input rating, the Gross Output rating (which some call the D.O.E. Heating Capacity) and then
Never gloat over someone else’s stupid mistake. Make it better if you can, but don’t laugh. Just let it slide and do your best to make like you never saw a thing. I say this because there’s a BIG ONE waiting for you down the road, my friend, and when you slam into it, you’re going to need all the understanding you can find
