This month's tip comes from Indiana Drycleaning and Laundry Association's April/May 2002 Clean Briefs from an article written by Christopher L. Birk CED/CPD/CPW and is used with his permission.  The information and opinions in this article do not necessarily express those of Laidlaw Corporation.

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This month we are going to talk a bit about water and how it plays an important part in your plant. While you might think I am going to talk again about wetcleaning, I am not, but about another very important thing water does for us, that is, steam. Without it, we can't do alot. So we need to care for our steam producing equipment: the boiler.

We all have a boiler that takes water and produces steam. Your boiler is typically a tube boiler or a tubeless boiler. In the tube varieties there are fire-tube and water-tube. Water tube boilers have the water inside the tube and the heat on the outside, fire-tube boilers have the "heat" on the inside and the water on the outside. But all three boiler types have one related fact, and that is, scale will reduce the efficiency and will cause premature failure.

So here we want water as good as possible. While the natural minerals in the water may be great for our bodies, they will shorten the life of your boiler. Many of us use soft water to our boiler. But how do you now if the water is really soft? Granted, there may be some test kit you can buy and send off OR you can use what are called softchek, which in an instant will tell you if you have soft water or how many grains of hardness. The grains are usually parts per million. The ideal situation is 0 grains of hardness. Every two weeks I do a spot check of the water. I have a hose barb installed on the incoming water line to the boiler return tank so I can check it very easily. Another advantage of using these sticks is that you can see if you are generating your softener often enough or too often. If you are having problems with your two check valves on your boiler feed line all the time, then my guess is that your water needs more conditioning. You do have two check valves in your boiler feed line? One being a spring loaded and the other being a "flapper plate"?

Let me tell what I consider the ideal way to have your boiler return tank water feed hooked up. Of course this is my opinion. Starting at the tank itself, install a "vacuum breaker" (or at least a check valve), then have a T or cross installed where you come off with a "boiler drain" (where you can hook up a washing machine hose for instance, I am referring the valve that you hook a hose up to (like connecting to a washing machine or to water your plants) and install a small anti-hammer device (this prevents the banging of pipes) then a somewhere in there a union so that you can easily crack it apart when you have to rebuild the United Brass float valve and finally a ball valve for easy on/off operation. The union is always after the the ball valve (in the direction of the flow of water) so you can turn off the ball valve and crack open the union and have no running water. By having a hose hooked up, you can get the same water going into the tank along with some other benefits.


Then many/most of you also use a boiler compound. Might I say, that soft water alone is not enough, nor is boiler compound alone enough, but the two together. Now granted if you water is very soft naturally and has no significant level of minerals in it, you might get by. In Peru (Indiana) our water comes from an underground river (teays river) and with all the limestone, etc. it contains alot of minerals. If you would like to know more about one great water that comes from Peru, go to www.colebros.com and you can read about some of Peru's water.

But wait a moment, if I have soft water, why do I need compound? A quality compound prevents the formation of carbonic acid as the oxygen is driven off. It raises the pH to prevent corrosion. It promotes mudding so you can blow down and remove these undesired elements. Along with other benefits. Many brands will have not only a test kit that you can test it yourself but can send it into the the lab also, to be sure that you are using enough and not too much. However, the most important test is to see the condition of your boiler when you open it up for your annual inspection. Case in point. When we installed our new Bryan water tube boiler back in 1976, we bought special compound from a company in Indiana who specializes in water treatment. Every few weeks, their representative stopped by and checked it out and each time gave us a perfect report. After about 6 months, the tubes plugged solid with water minerals and their excuse was "oops we mis-made the compound" but remember their rep telling us how it was perfect when he ran his tests.

So a few other helpful hints. I always install a "whole house" sediment filter in front of any water softener I install. And then I use a 5 micron filter in it. This not only removes out a bunch of gunk that the softener won't have to deal with but it also helps the softener controls and valves from being worn by this sediment.

Back in 1983, we noticed after we installed new equipment, the boiler could hardly keep up. Eventually a water tube went bad and we re-tubed the whole boiler. What a difference it made, the scale was really stealing away from its ability and capacity. We switched brands of compound etc. and so it has been over 17 years on the same tubes. This boiler replaced a non-tube boiler that was only about 14 years old but that the previous owner had not maintained with compound, etc. So just don't think that if you have a "fulton" or other tubeless boiler that it doesn't matter. The scale will cause overheating of the metal and that will lead to fatigue, which is usually what happens with the tubes in a fire tube or water tube boiler. Either style of boiler can give you long life if you keep good clean water in them that is properly pre-treated. And a 10 bhp boiler is a 10 bhp boiler. I have heard a few sales reps say over the years, that one brand will give you more steam than another. That may or may not be true, but by the rating of 10bhp, that means 345 lbs of steam per hour. Many HRT (horizontal firetube boilers) can be "over used" without problems, but don't expect 15 bhp out of a 10bhp boiler.

Lastly there are the questions, like how often should I blow down, and for how long... The first place to start is your boiler manual for their recommendations. There are alot of different beliefs about boiler blow downs, and while most agree daily, some will say at the end of the day, some will say when the steam pressure is no higher than 30 lbs. My suggestion is do what is recommended and what works. I heard of a fellow who every night totally drained his boiler and introduced brand new "bad" water every morning... Didn't make sense to me.

This article expresses the personal opinion of its author and neither the author nor IDLA warrant as accurate any of this information. Each person is to decide on their own, decisions related to things discussed in this article and IDLA and the author assume NO liability for anything presented herein.


Used with permission. Copyright 2002 Laidlaw Corp.