Hydronic

A Well Planned Emergency Boiler Retrofit

Submitted By Dan Vastyan The heating system at Sierra Grande K-12 school in Fort Garland, Colo., was struggling. Of the three old, 1.8 million BTU boilers in the mechanical room, one had been down for quite some time. Another caught fire early in the heating season. It was then– when only one unit remained–that school administrators decided it was time ...

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High Altitude Boiler Bliss

By Dan Vastyan Intro Photo: (L-R) Neil Wagner, Nick Valenti, Mike Merryman of McCoy Sales and Ben Dunn. Just about anything that consumes a fuel source – whether that be a human body, an automobile, or a gas range – performs best at sea level.  Oxygen levels in the atmosphere decrease exponentially as elevation increases.  At 16,000 feet above sea level, ...

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Microbubbles

by George Lanthier* If you are a service manager you may, from time to time, ask yourself if all of the pumps your serviceman are replacing are in fact bad, or not. If you’re a serviceman you may be asking yourself the same question. Many manufacturers wonder the same thing. Could you explain why you changed all of the pumps ...

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A Little More on pH

Feature Story by George Lanthier A lot of you asked me for more information on pH and how it pertains to heating systems, so here we go. If you look up pH in an encyclopedia you will find that it is ‘a measurement of the acidic level and the base of a solution in regards to the activity of hydrogen ...

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When good goes bad

Feature Story Proper testing of system anti-freeze will help prevent problems down the roadBy George Lanthier In many of my seminars, especially those about hydronics and cold-weather servicing of heating systems, an issue comes up that always surprises me that people don’t know about: how non-toxic or inhibited propylene glycol solutions, or system anti-freeze, can go bad and you may ...

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