Inert Ramblings

After limping along our old oil-fired steam boiler for the past two months, our brand new Utica SFH Steam Oil Boiler was installed yesterday. Although we’re now quite a few thousand dollars poorer, the peace of mind and fuel savings made the investment well worth it! Even though the insulation was removed from all of the steam pipes and hasn’t been reinstalled yet, the new system performs infinitely better than the old decrepit system that we used to have.

The previous 50 gallon system took over two and a half hours just to get up to temperature and then another few hours after that to raise the room temperature five degrees. The 15 gallon Utica takes a little over ten minutes to get every radiator in the house fired up and, even with the heat off all day during the installation, it only took half an hour to an hour to raise the temperature of the entire house ten degrees! To maintain temperature, it only needs to fire for a few minutes every once in a while.

To finish everything up, the next step is to draftproof the basement and finish installing fiberglass jackets on all of the steam pipes. Once that’s done, I’ll be insulating the floors to minimize heat soak. Since stripping all the floors down to the wide pine and finishing them with polyurethane, drafts have become an issue because of the plank spacing. You can peer right into the basement in quite a few spots. So, the gaps will need to be taped from the bottom and, if that doesn’t solve the draft issues, fiberglass will need to be installed.