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Now, poop burns mighty hot. The flue gasses that come out of this incinerator are around 2,000 degrees. If they let that fly up the chimney it would look like Cape Canaveral and the neighbors would probably get concerned. So the engineers take those flue gasses and cycle them through this other steam boiler that is larger than Madison Square Garden. Here, they produce steam at 400 psig, which they then vent though a pipe in the roof. From a distance, this plant appears to be producing clouds as a subcontractor to God.
I asked my friend why they were doing all of this and he shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “I’m just the contractor.”
Being young and innocent in those days, I asked, “Why don’t you just use a hot-water boiler?” “The maintenance people are used to taking care of steam boilers,” the engineer explained. “We don’t know what they’d do with a hot water boiler.”
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You may wonder, as my friend did, why the engineers don’t just take the 400-psig of wasted steam and use it to heat their buildings. After all, the supply of poop is never-ending, and the load (so to speak) is more than sufficient. All it would take would be a pipe from here to the PRV station. There is really no reason to have the two 35,000,000 BTUH boilers producing steam at 100-psig, which is immediately reduced to 15-psig, and then converted to 180-degree water. It appears to be the Department of Redundancy Department at work. I suspect that some engineer was frightened by the possibility that all the citizens may become constipated at the same time. Back-up (no pun intended) thus became essential.
Years ago, I looked at a set of plans and specs for a new public school in New York City. This place was three-stories tall and they were going to heat it with hot water. They specified a steam boiler, a shell-and-tube heat exchanger with a load that equaled the steam boiler’s, and a boiler-feed pump that could have doubled as a studio apartment. They were producing steam at low pressure and sending it to the heat exchanger, which was to be directly above the steam boiler. The feed pump was right next to the boiler.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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