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It all started when a friend called to tell me about this old gravity hot-water system that had him baffled. “There’s no expansion tank anywhere on this job,” he said. “You sure? I asked.” “Yep. I looked everywhere.” “Did you go in the attic?” “That’s the first place I went,” he said. “I know that’s where they installed those open tanks. They vented them out onto the roof.” “Maybe it was a closed gravity system,” I said. “The Dead Men built those too, you know. They installed closed steel compression tanks either in the attic or in the basement. Those jobs didn’t have circulators, but they all had tanks. I’ve never seen one without a tank.” “Would you like to see one?” he asked. So we got together, and I did what he had done, that being traipse up and down the stairs a few dozen times. No tank. The job was heating just fine, though; it’s just that there wasn’t any compression tank. Anywhere. Now, you’d expect the relief valve to be popping, wouldn’t you? Right. But it didn’t. The water heated and cooled between cycles, but the pressure gauge hardly moved. I tapped it a few times, figuring it was busted (but who can tell by tapping?).
Each radiator had a manual vent so I opened one and a lot of air came out. This was pretty weird because the radiator was heating well. Where the heck was all this air coming from? My buddy and I bled the rest of the radiators throughout the house, and we got air from all of them. A lot of air. We wondered why this particular Dead Man had never finished the job of bleeding his radiators. The radiators were heating just fine, though, and that added to the mystery.
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After a while I noticed that every cast-iron radiator on this job was piped with a bottom-to-bottom connection. That got me
thinking because those radiators were huge, and I figured, given their size, they might be a great place to store air.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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