Heating Help

I think you'll like this one. A plumber puts in a new heating system for a homeowner, but there's a problem with the new oil storage tank in the basement. The thing leaks like a spaghetti colander, and that’s never a good thing. And naturally, the homeowner notices this right away and demands a new oil tank. But the plumber doesn't want to deal with all that oil, so he convinces the guy to wait until the tank is only about half full. He'll take care of it then, and amazingly, the homeowner agrees to this.

When the level goes down to where he wants it to be, the plumber returns to the job, slides a new 275-gallon tank down the basement stairs, and sets it in place, right next to the leaker. His challenge now is to figure out how to get the oil from the bad tank into the good tank. For some reason, it never occurs to him to use a pump. Perhaps he doesn't own a pump, and this is certainly not the time to go shopping. Keep in mind that he is working for free at this point.

So he gives it some deep thought and comes up with a brilliant idea. He plugs all but one of the tappings in the top of the bad tank. In the one tapping that he doesn't plug, he installs a Schrader valve. He then runs a 3/8" copper line from the bottom of the leaking tank to the bottom of the new tank. Using an air compressor connected by a rubber hose to the Schrader valve, he proceeds to gently coax the oil out the bottom of the old tank, through the 3/8" tubing, and up into the new tank. He does this because he is a world-class knucklehead.

Now, as you can imagine, gently coaxing approximately 140 gallons of Number 2 fuel oil through a 3/8" line requires patience. Unfortunately, patience is not a quality that this particular knucklehead possesses to any measurable degree. He figures that every minute spent on this job is costing him money, and he wants to get done quickly so that he can get back to charging people.

So he cranks the air compressor up to 100-psi and sits there with a big smile on his face.

Now, a guy can do a lot of coaxing with a 100-psi air compressor. What he doesn't realize, however, is that an oil storage tank is not a pressure-rated vessel. If you've been around the industry for a while (say, three days or so), you really should know this. But this knowledge has somehow eluded our bold adventurer, and the leaking tank, feeling violated, displays its displeasure by exploding and relocating itself, with appropriate violence, 15 feet away from its starting point. The 140 gallons of Number 2 fuel oil travel considerably further than 15 feet, as you might imagine, but this isn't as much of a concern to the plumber since it just swirls into a nearby floor drain and flows downhill to a local, once-pristine brook.

And that really didn’t bother our knucklehead because he figured that oil is natural. Just like water. What's the big deal?

Another guy called to tell me about a new boiler that he installed to take the place of an old Iron Fireman boiler. He stopped by to do some service on the new boiler not long after the installation and found leaves and twigs in the base of the chimney. There was a huge tree overhanging the house. The leaves had fallen down the uncapped chimney, as leaves (and birds, squirrels, raccoons and other critters) will do when the burner remains off all summer.

Now, the homeowner in this case happens to be the sort of guy who likes to stare over any service technician's shoulder, and when he saw the debris inside his chimney he concluded that the new boiler was sucking all this stuff down his chimney. "Today it's twigs and leaves," he said. "Who knows what might happen if a big bird happens to fly by!" The old boiler had never presented such a hazard to the flora and fauna in his neighborhood, and the homeowner, being a lover of natural things, knew that he must take action. So he called the Environmental Protection Agency and demanded an investigation into this phenomenon. The installer now had to explain the natural wonders of draft to a guy with a briefcase, a scowl on his face, and the power of the United States Government behind him.

Here's a Florida story for you. This one was in the Wall Street Journal a while back. It seems that a steam boiler showed up missing from Miami's classy Beacon Hotel in South Beach. The owner's representative noted (and rightly so), "A steam boiler isn't the sort of thing that you can stick in your Speedo and walk out with."

Naturally!

Now you may wonder if the stolen boiler was covered by insurance, but, sadly, it was not. The owner's representative explained, "One does not normally take out theft insurance on a steam boiler."

It wouldn't be natural, I suppose.

A police spokesman reasoned that it must have taken five men and a truck to remove the huge steam boiler from the bowels of this 80-room hotel. There were no signs of forcible entry, however, and no apparent motive. And keep in mind that a cast iron boiler has little or no scrap value. The Journal reporter concluded the only sensible use for the boiler was as, well, a boiler.

Don't you wish you had a crew like that working for you?

I once worked for a manufacturer's representative and we sold circulators by the tens of thousands. At some point during a lazy weekend, thieves broke into our warehouse and made off with 160 Bell & Gossett Series 100 circulators. Now that's two full pallets of pumps, which is quite a bit of weight to pass though a small broken window.

The only problem for the thieves was that B&G does not pack flanges with their pumps. So we waited several days, and sure enough, someone called in an order for 160 pair of flanges in various sizes.

"You want pumps with those flanges?"

"Nah, we're good."

And dumb.

Scripps Howard News Service reported a while ago that in Sweden they are now warming homes with the heat generated by the cremated remains of local dead people. Some religious leaders, it was reported, were up in arms over this. However, Borje Stolt, the chief inspector of the Helsingborg crematorium said, "It is environment-friendly, and relatives can console themselves in the knowledge that the death of a loved one benefits the whole community." To this, Baptist preacher, Lennart Nilsson, replied, "No one wants Aunt Astrid heating up his or her living room!"

It wouldn’t be natural.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, it requires about four Therms of natural gas to light-up the average dead Swede. The experts are not quite sure of the Gross BTUH output from a dead Swede, but it must be considerable. The Energy Company that's been running these barbecues estimates that about 10 percent of the energy they've used to warm the 60,000 homes they service with their district heating plant during the previous six months came from people like Aunt Astrid.

You can't make this stuff up.