Heating Help

Need help. Putting off skimmg?

I fired up the new boiler last Sunday for the first time.  It hasen't run much until the past few days so I didn't want to skim yet.

Tonight the water line is bouncing a good 1/2"-1" in the sight glass.  I was hoping to skim it tomorrow, but am worried about waiting any longer.
Can this cause damage or is it perfectly safe to wait until tomorrow?  Tonight is suppose to be fairly cold so the system is going to run a decent amount.

No problem

That's not bouncing that much -- relax and skim when you get around to it.

Jamie is right

Its not that critical right now , it will be fine till you get a chace to do it. 1/2 to 1 is not much of a surge, but make sure you run it for a while before you do , this way you get all the oils to float.


David

Skimming

Hi Chris-
   It sounds as though more oil is working its way out of the piping. Generally operating the boiler can't hurt it. The only consideration might be if the wet steam was causing a lot of water hammer. and with your high boiler risers and big header,thsat  should take care of most of the wet steam. In a lot of cases a pro will wait a several days until he thinks all the oil has worked its way into the system just so he won't have to come back and skim again.
Since you're now doing skimming I've attached some info on it.
- Rod

phew

Thanks all for responding. You made me feel a lot better.
I hope to do it tomorrow as I'm assuming most if not all of the oil has washed down.

All skimmed.

At least for now.  I skimmed around 15 gallons out of it over a period of time while occasionally firing the burners to keep it hot.

I also closed the skimmer and bottom sight glass valve, opened sight glass drain and in a sense skimmed it from the top of the sight glass.  Reason was to wash the glass which it did.  I then went back to skimming from the skim port for a while.

The water smelled like a box of bandaids.  I saw zero pipe dope, zero chunks of anything even when I drained a fair amount of water from all drains on the boiler.  I guess I got some oil out but honestly it didn't seem like a huge amount.

I then steamed for 20-25 minutes and it seemed smoother though not perfect.  Water in sight glass moves around 1/4" up and down which may be as good as shes gonna get with a 2" equalizer?

Stable Waterline

Hi Chris- A 1/4 inch up and down sounds perfect. You'll always get some movement. If you don't get movement, you need to check whether you paid the fuel bill last month! :)
- Rod

BAH!

So when I skimmed I removed around 15 gallons of water over a period of an hour two.  I did it with the boiler hot, cycling the burners ocassionally.
I then filled the boiler high enough to drain through the top of the sight glass and out the bottom to wash the glass.  I also rinsed out the bottom tap on the sight glass.

After this I cracked open the two drains I have on the boiler and got a blast of rusty looking water out of each and then it ran clear.  I also cracked open the drain on my wet return which was clean.

I thought all was well, but tonight I went down to check on things and I have a brown film in my sight glass again!  Am I doing something wrong?  Is it normal to have a brown film on the dry area of the sight glass just above the water line?
or.. is the boiler simply not done cleaning it self and the system and I need to skim again?