Heating Help

Heating Hell photos of the past

I came across these photos in one of my heating install files. I didn't take these pictures and can't take any credit other than finding them amusing enough to save.

I'm pretty sure they came from others on The Wall to begin with, so if anyone recognizes these, please step forward!

-Terry

Zone Valves With Hanging Wires

This is a pic of one of my boiler jobs.  I remove all that stuff and did it up real nice. BTW this was 1 boiler room out of 5 that were in this condition.  We fixed them all. 

Wonderful....

I use those photos in my ModCon boiler installation program to show people how NOT to install heating systems. In most cases, it gets a good chuckle, but in some cases, the inspectors say it is more common than we know....

Sad state of affairs.

ME

The one with 19 zone valves............

I wonder what size transformer they had on that puppy.  I also like the duct tape holding the cap on the chimney cleanout tee.  It doesn't get much better than that.

Poly nightmare

The pic with all the zone valves and polyethylene was from a no heat and possible boiler replacement call I was sent to in Boulder, CO. There was another identical cast iron they had piped into the system that was disabled and shoved into a corner along with a pile of iron pumps and expansion tanks. By the way, this wasn't a radiant infloor app., it was a baseboard job.

I informed the customer of the oxygen permeation of the tubing and the effect on ferrous components and they said, "Why didn't the other plumbers that bid the job didn't say anything about that?"  I said the ones you picked must not be experienced in hydronics as I am. BTW, they brought this house to fix and flip. They hadn't lived there in the winter and didn't know how it performed. Without doing a heat loss I could tell the baseboard was marginal. Using a mod con and resetting the output temps using lower temps to preserve the polyethylene was probably out of the question. A total repipe was the only way I wanted to approach it. They asked for a ballpark figure for just replacing the boiler. I called the next day after some figuring and gave a price along with disclaimers. They said I was 3 times higher than the  highest bid they had so far and thanked me for my time. 

That was 3 years ago and I've always wondered what happened with that job. I imagine we may see some photos of it on the wall in the future. Addition pics attached.

May I add???

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