HVAC

Feature Story By Alan Mercurio The following story is one that I have had the privilege to share with many of our fellow technicians around the world, through my book Carry The Torch: Life experiences and technical data to live by. As we head into the winter months, I thought you might enjoy reading the story as much I enjoyed ...

Feature Story Used properly, steam heating can still be a valid way to provide indoor comfort By Frank ‘Steamhead” Wilsey So, you get a call where someone wants you to fix a steam-heating system. What comes to mind? Antiquated?Noisy?Uneven?Inefficient?Why doesn’t this stuff just go away, like they said it would back in the 1950s and 1960s?Why, indeed? Let’s take a ...

Cover StoryUpdated heating system cures the ills of century-old Baptist church By william montgomery Driving up Connecticut’s old Route 7 through the towns of Norwalk, Wilton, Redding and Ridgefield, up into Danbury, you pass through some of the state’s most beautiful scenery. As we took a ride up that route to take a look at a recent steam boiler installation ...

Feature Story By George Lanthier A lot of us do work on what I call commercial burners. Those burners are, by my definition, anything that fires lo-hi-lo, also called two-stage, and that normally means a firing rate between 6.00 gallons per hour and 35.00 gph. All those burners that fire single-stage below 6.00 gph are nothing but big residential burners ...

Cover Story Too much money and fuel are wasted every year because of the difficulty in choosing the right capacity boiler. When a residential or commercial boiler is specified, it must be sized to provide enough heat to overcome the coldest anticipated outdoor temperatures. However, because these extreme temperatures occur very rarely, the boiler chosen is usually forced to produce ...

Feature Story Testing your equipment before the onset of the heating season can save a lot of headachesBy George Lanthier A lot of my recent articles have focused on meters, testers and gauges, and in response to those articles a lot of my e-mail surprised me, but I guess in some ways it didn’t. When writing articles I’m finding out ...

Feature Story By Chris Traczek Like Fuel Oil News, many companies in the fuel-oil industry have been in business for 70-plus years. Two, Taco, Inc. and ECR International, chose to share with us how they have been able to stay ahead of the curve over the past seven decades. Taco innovates for the “good of the industry”Taco, Inc., Cranston, R.I., ...

Feature“Diagnostic troubleshooting” can often eliminate the misdiagnosed “blown seal”By George Lanthier Most of this article comes from one I did a long time ago, but it has to do with probably the most troublesome leak on an oil burner. It originates at the burner housing and in most cases the pump is replaced for an alleged bad seal. The truth ...

Featuresby George Lanthier Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about one of my favorite things to teach and one of my pet peeves. I did an article on this subject about 10 years ago, but it seems at every seminar I teach, it keeps coming up. What makes it even sadder is the cause and the fact that we only ...

FeaturesBy Lindy Lindtveit For Part I Click Here In Part II, we pick up our discussion of the new Tigerloop Model TN oil de-aerator introduced in early 2005 by Tigerholm of Sweden and Westwood Products of the U.S. The new Model TN replaces the former Model T60I, which is the original oil de-aerator and which is installed on millions of ...