how long will old boiler last?

[Pete C.]

Really? I thought they spent their time posting on alt.hvac...

[Ed Pawlowski]

First off, thanks to everybody for all the great replies. I'll probably see if I make it through this season and then maybe switch to a gas boiler next year. Yes, it is steam heat here.

I'm getting frazzled looking at pages for "indirect DHW setup" quoted above, even this brochure:

nobody explains what exactly it is. It's apparently a separate tank, rather than having the coils right in the boiler primary water - but where does it go? How does it attach to or connect with the boiler?

Thanks again, I learned a lot.

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If you have gas available, it is usually cheaper, more efficient, and easier to operate. That would be my first choice.

Amtrol makes a good tank. Indirect heater are fairly simple. They are an insulated tank with a coil inside. There are four water connections. The b bulk of the tank is the domestic water. You have a feed and an outlet to the fixtures. Inside the tank is a coil or plate heat exchanger and that has two connections to the boiler. One feeds the heated water in, the other returns back to the boiler. The waters never mix, but the coil gives off heat to the domestic water and you have a lot of stored water that can remain very hot for over 24 hours without turning on the burner if not used. Just as a typical hot water system has zones and circulators, the stand alone tank works the same way. Thee are thermostates of course to control everything.

[Marilyn & Bob]

One other thing I would look at is a new boiler without a tankless or indirect DHW and a standalone gas water heater . A standalone water heater will be more expensive to run during heating season, but quite a bit cheaper during the rest of the year.

[Ed Pawlowski]

One other thing I would look at is a new boiler without a tankless or indirect DHW and a standalone gas water heater . A standalone water heater will be more expensive to run during heating season, but quite a bit cheaper during the rest of the year.

[Marilyn & Bob]

Because you have to run the boiler and keep it hot enough for your domestic hot water even in the many months that you do not need the boiler for heat. Even with an efficient boiler, the fuel to do this is more than what is needed to just heat the water in a standalone WH.

[Ed Pawlowski]

Because you have to run the boiler and keep it hot enough for your domestic hot water even in the many months that you do not need the boiler for heat. Even with an efficient boiler, the fuel to do this is more than what is needed to just heat the water in a standalone WH.

[Tom]

Does anybody make an indirect DHW that uses the boiler to heat the DHW during the cold season, but has a secondary heater (electric or gas) for the warm weather when the boiler isn't being used?

If not, then at this point, I'm thinking that next year the ideal might be a new gas boiler (keeping all the old radiators), with possibly a separate gas DHW heater. That way, costs might be the least, especially from not being hijacked by OPEC and the oil companies/speculators when the recession ends and petroleum starts to skyrocket again.

Here's another wrinkle regarding gas vs oil: two years ago, the oil burner one afternoon just didn't come on, even though the thermostat was calling for heat. It did fire up again once I'd hit the reset - but what if I was away for a few days? That could have been the nightmare scenario of a burst pipe (even in the short section between where the water supply enters the house and the house's main shutoff valve). Btw, the service guy that came a week later didn't have any explanation as to how/why the burner failed to light. But he did say that oil was less reliable in that way than gas.

I'd guess that the total nightmare is ending up with a cellar filled with a gigantic block of ice? Then what... you can't even live in the house until the springtime? I won't even leave the house overnight in winter anymore since that scare two years ago.

[sorry for the delay in responding - something came up and I couldn't concentrate on this until today]

[Ed Pawlowski]

NO, because it is not needed. New boilers are very efficient and even in summer will be cheap to operate for DHW. My boiler is oil and is much cheaper than electric and has more capacity than a stand alone gas heater. If no water is needed, it will not run at all for days since the storage tank is well insulated. A heat exchanger moves the heat to the water tank. An efficient system moves virtually all the heat from the boiler to the tank too. .

My old boiler used to do that at time, the new one not at all, at least not yet. Oil is more prone to go out on the reset than gas from my experience. If you don't get ignition for any one a a myriad of reasons, it trips for safety. Pump did not pump enough, igniter did not spark well enough, a piece of carbon got across the tip of the igniter, etc.

That said, any heater with any fuel has the potential to break.

[Tom]

Thanks. One thing I hadn't mentioned was that there was no smell of oil after the failure to ignite incident. (I did swivel open the hatch at the time, and I'd suppose it'd take a while for fuel oil to evaporate from the closed chamber up the chimney.) So I'd guess that tends to argue against lack of spark. Yet why would it not pump oil during the failed instance, but then start right up later? I suppose it's possible that the burner motor wasn't getting electricity momentarily, but the sensing-controlling circuits were...

There had been one occasion a couple of years previous, where the burner wouldn't run at all until I'd removed certain wires and re-attached them to their terminals. It is a damp cellar, too.

[Ed Pawlowski]

"Tom" wrote

It may not smell, especially if there was a time lag before you noticed it. If it happens again, just reach in and rub the electrode with your finger and it may start. All it takes is a hairline piece of carbon from tip to ground to stop it from firing.