Heating Help

Can anyone ID this trap?

This building is about 1920. All rads have this trap, many have vents....arrrrg!

Banging about 10 minutes after start up, 2-pipe system. Banging is down the line, not boiler room.

No idea why it rotated my pic.....

Tim

Page 261

The Lost Art Of Steam Figure 45 looks like it

thanks!

I'll look that up now! I figured someone would have seen it....

Tim

Almost...

Almost but not quite. these "traps" have a check ball in them....not a baffler or swinging flap. They also have some type of drain plug. Just want to know if they are true traps and should be replaced with modern traps since steam is getting by and banging. Vents were added at the end of the line to get steam to trouble areas when raising pressure caused too much banging....

OE

Tim its an O-E, page 264 in my older copy of the LAOSH, ill try and scan teh page and post it

Its not a trap,

its an OE Specialties Co. water seal..ensure the radiator is not sagged toward the supply valve or the ball check will roll toward the radiator causing it to not heat well..

O-E

See pic

Super cool!

So these traps obviously needed to be cleaned, thus the small port under them.

Can they be replaced with a trap? Still available or just convert to 2-pipe with traps?

Should the boiler have a vaporstat and not a pressuretrol which is currently set to just over 2lbs???

And for main vents they have standard Hoffman main vents that stand up on tall pipes off the returns. Is this the correct beast as well?

Boiler is a 10 year old Smith sectional. Several rads have vents on them.

Tim

with those water seals

the pressure in the boiler and piping should be kept low..so yes a vaporstat is in order, as perhaps downfiring may be if your getting to much steam into the returns..the inlet valves may need orifices slipped into the unions also..see, here is the thing with OE water seals, the air vent hole in the seal body is a drilled out screw, and the size of the drilling was supposed to be increased if the radiator was large, but human nature says 'just grab a screw' so when i've investigated this, i've always found the same size drilling used on every water seal. Which was wrong..but 'it is what it is'..to answer your question, yes, you can install regular traps and it will work fine..the main vents should be okay, but the more the merrier..same as any vapor job..two stage firing would really help alot if its gas..