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 Somewhere in America an old friend of mine is hanging a low-NOX gas/oil burner on the side of this enormous steam boiler. This burner weighs 3,600 pounds and is the size of a Buick. It produces screaming air currents that sound like a banshee, but no one seems to mind because it’s in a very noisy place. Once installed, this burner will belch flame into a boiler that will produce 35-million BTUH of steam at 100 psig. Big enough for you?Once he’s done, the steam will travel about 150 feet to a pressure-reducing-valve station, which will reduce the pressure to 15 psig. From there, it will travel a bit further to some shell-and-tube heat exchangers that will convert the latent heat to 180-degree-Fahrenheit water so that they can heat some buildings with baseboard convectors. There is no need for high-pressure steam anywhere else in this facility. The boiler is there because someone who wanted it there specified it. Make sense so far? I didn’t think so either.
Why, you wonder, is there another boiler? Redundancy. My friend didn’t plan any of this. He just marvels at it all, as do I. He does what he’s told to do, and he gets paid, and that’s just fine with him. If they ask him to hang a burner that is bigger than the Fourth of July, then that’s what he’s going to do. He’s a contractor, not an engineer. You’re wondering what they do here? Well, they treat sewage. They gather it from great pipes; separate this from that, and collect the Essence of Poop. This, they compress into tight little briquettes, which they set afire in an incinerator that is as big as your imagination. They use natural gas to get things going, and once begun, the process is self-perpetuating. As long as there is a ready supply of poop, that is. Which there always is, we being a well-fed people.
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My friend is, of course, getting paid big bucks to hang that Buick of a burner. The other boiler has the same burner. It’s a bit older, but the same size.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
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