Eric Johnson (00:00)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson on this podcast. Talk about boiler industry topics as well as personal development. Wild, part of the name of the podcast stands for work hard, invest yourself, lead others in develop yourself into a person of excellence. We should always strive to get better. I try to do that and I hope you do too. Today I have one that is
useful for anybody who is installing steam boilers that are more on the production side for steam systems. This won't really apply to heating systems unless the heating system is pretty large. But let's get into it. No need to waste some time, but I do appreciate everybody who has rated the podcast five stars.
If you haven't already, go ahead and open up your podcast app and rate the boiler wild podcast five stars. That would help me and help others find the podcasts. And yeah, we can make a boilers known worldwide. I was actually wearing a boilers hats. I made hats. It's got like boilers in this like cool cursive script.
And a guy came up to me, he said, do you go to Purdue? I'm like, no, I just work with boilers. And he's like, I figured, I saw boilers, Purdue Boilermakers. I was like, no, unfortunately, no, same thing, but not, no affiliation with Purdue. So that is what you get when you boiler stuff out in the public. But.
Let's talk about the number one thing that will make or break your steam blower startup. So you may be wondering, well, it's got to be the fuel. Well, yes and no, it could be the fuel, but not in this case. We're going to assume the fuel is correctly engineered, that you have the proper gas pressure, that you have the proper oil pressure, that everything is fine for that. Well, it could be the system design. Well, yeah, it could be, but...
We're going assume that the system is designed good enough that it's not going to affect your steam output and the startup of your boiler system and a little bit of maintenance. Any little errors can be corrected, but that is not going to be the number one error. think, think about a startup technician, when they are arriving on site, they are looking over your, boilers.
They see everything is correct. They see that the fuel and gas piping is correct. They see that the water piping is correct. The water delivery system is correct. The feed water system, all that stuff. They see blow down, the drains are correct. Everything looks correct. And in their mind, the checklist that they're been marking off, it looks like, okay, I can...
look like I can start up these boilers. So they go to start up the boilers and depending on how large the boilers are and what type of boiler this is, this can be quite the process. Most boilers require a boil out, which can take some time, but you have to do the boil out. So a lot of owners will think, oh, boiler startup, they're going to be running at the end of the day. Not really. The boil out typically takes
most of the day or all day per boiler. And it is quite the process. And then you have all the little tiny stuff of trying to set up the combustion curve and do all the wiring and make sure the wiring is correct and that the feed water system is correct and all that stuff. But all that stuff is just the minor stuff. Your startup person, if that is you, you will know this, but...
This has also been making it into manufacturers manuals because it is such a game changer when you have startup and you may have thought about it yourself now or you still maybe think about what I'm going to say but the number one thing that will make or break a steam boiler startup is having a steam vent. I know, revolutionary. But a steam vent will be the difference between
a smooth boiler startup versus one that goes poorly and is dragged out and is not done correctly. And what do I mean by a steam vent? I mean somewhere to dump steam into a safe location and as much steam as possible so that you can run the boiler plant or boilers at all at high fire and do everything you need without having to worry about the header pressure.
over pressurizing and the boiler's turning off on their operating pressure controls. A steam vent is critical for a steam boiler startup. And it is such an easy add and it makes such a difference and is such a time saver for the boiler startup person. And it can also be used for the life of the system. So say you have a manufacturing process and you have like three boilers.
and you're tuning combustion on a boiler, yet the process is only consuming about 30%, 50 % of the steam capacity. Yet you gotta take this boiler all the way into high fire. You have to do this dance between turning off the boilers that are running and then taking one into high fire so that you don't over pressurize it. But then you have to do it quickly because you're probably producing too much steam.
and then you're rushing through the top end of the curve and what if there's issues and what if the boiler does shut down and then it takes about two to three minutes to get a fire back in a boiler so then steam pressure is dropping rapidly and the process may be interrupted. It's this whole dance where if you can just have a vent you can start venting steam and the boilers
that are running will start trying to make header pressure, but you can regulate the vent. And then when you start the boiler that you are working on, that you're setting combustion on, you can then start opening the vent more as you increase the firing rate of the boiler. And if you do have issues in the higher parts of the combustion curve, you can get all those issues straightened out without having to...
dance around what the actual load of the process is and worry about all the other boilers. You just have to worry about how much steam you are venting. You don't want to vent too much steam so that the boilers can't make the pressure for the header that they are supposed to. all it takes is, depending on the size of the steam vent, all it takes is a couple turns of a valve, typically a globe.
valve. I'll talk about that but a couple turns of a valve and you'll be good. So what makes a good steam vent? So one, it's going to be sized correctly for the header. So if your header is 16 inches and you put on a one inch vent, that's probably not going to be enough. And this will all depend on your steam pressure, steam velocities and where you are. I have worked at places that had a steam vent and
It was kind of in a little valley, a little industrial park, and there was no silencer on the outlet of the vent. And when I would blow the steam out of the vent and would go outside, it was very, very loud. So if you haven't already, you should go find some place that is blown a ton of steam out of an open pipe. The acoustics are pretty wild, especially if you have a lot of buildings around you.
And this was a, the one I'm thinking about is a building and it was kind of surrounded by a residential neighborhood. And those neighbors definitely heard the boiler venting the steam out of the header and into the atmosphere. That's what a steam vent is. a common mistake I see on a steam vent is they only put a gate valve.
A gate valve is an isolation valve. It is not a regulating valve. A gate valve, the seat will quickly wear out. If you use that as a steam vent, it may work during the startup, but the seat will get worn and eventually it will no longer seal. And then you'll always have steam being wasted out of the vent. I would always recommend, and I don't believe there's any standard to this.
but I think it's just best practice. I would always recommend two valves. One is a gate valve and one is a globe valve. And you would pipe the vent off the header where it can be opened and all boilers can access that location. So sometimes you'll have some split headers or some do some weird stuff with your steam system.
If for any reason all the boilers, the steam doesn't go into the same header or one is isolated or you have a 50-50 plant where the header is split in half and the pressures are different, you would need two steam vents in that case. But in the mythical scenario we're going to talk about, we only have one header. We have multiple boilers and we will be able to control header steam pressure.
through this vent, I would put the gate valve first and then I would put the globe valve after that. So if the globe valve needs servicing or it needs change, you can isolate with the gate valve and have the gate valve off. But it doesn't really matter if you put the globe valve and the gate valve, but you do not want to regulate with a gate valve. So a globe valve is for regulating and
depending on where your header is, I would also recommend if it is up high, I would recommend you have chains on these valves so that you can move the chains without having to get on a lift or climb up on stairs or a ladder or however you got to do that because when you are regulating the steam pressure, increasing boiling firing rate, it can be a lot of back and forth work and manipulating a chain driven valve.
a lot easier than climbing up and down a ladder. It also helps people avoid being lazy. But a globe valve is for regulating. So if you are just firing up the boiler that you are trying to start up and there is no load and you have no load to the plant because they are not done with that process yet, yet the contractor wants the boiler starter to be complete.
So you would isolate all the outlets on the header and make sure that they're all flanged off, you know, locked out, tagged out, all safe so you're not sending steam anywhere. And the steam essentially is never going to leave the boiler room. It is just going to go from the boilers to the header and then out the vent. So you can open the vent just a little bit to start creating a little bit of load. You're probably going to want to pressure test your boiler to make sure that
the controls are working, the pressure controls. So you can do that with the valve on the boiler closed, or you can just close the vent or just open up the vent just a little bit to bleed steam. It doesn't matter how you do it, but you want to make sure your controls are working on a brand new boiler startup. But then once you do have your controls are working, say you have a 100 PSI set point, you bring out the boiler to 100 PSI.
Now what do you do? You can't send the steam anywhere because they don't have a load and you can't cool down the boiler fast enough because that's just gonna take days and days and days. And you weren't able to get through the whole combustion curve because the boiler is so large that there isn't enough load. It went off on operating steam pressure.
So you open up the vent, which creates an artificial load. The steam pressure starts dropping and then the boiler turns back on. And depending on how the vent is sized and how much pressure you need in your header, you can open that vent wide open. You can have it at 50%. You can have it just 25%, but you can manipulate the vent so that the steam pressure inside the system
kind of mimics how the system will actually work. And you can work out issues with your DA. You can set your DA temperature valve. You can do all kinds of stuff. Make sure your steam traps are working on your header. Make sure everything is piped correctly. And there's all kinds of things that you do during a startup where it would be very difficult to do if you are having to.
work with a live load or a load that is not connected or not complete. And a lot of contractors miss this. And when the boiler starter person comes in and says, hey, we need some place to put steam, where are we going to put it? They initially at the front of project always thought, well, we'll just use it with the load. Well, the load isn't connected yet and whatever, but.
we need to start the boilers for whatever reason because the load isn't gonna be done for another three months. And we don't want the boilers just sitting here. So we need to get the boilers done. There's all kinds of reasons why the boilers get started before the connected load is started. Hospitals, that's common. You need your boiler plant running before the hospital comes online. You're not gonna be heating and sterilizing for the first time.
when you're just starting your boilers because a boiler startup there will always be issues and the boilers are going to need to be shut off and shut down and maybe opened up but definitely there's going to be electrical problems and probably some piping leaks here and there and being able to vent steam quickly off the system if you do need to get it to zero you know you isolate the boiler so that the residual heat from the
water boiling, that all stays in the boiler and then you vent the header so that now you get the header to zero pressure so you can fix any leaks on the piping flanges all that stuff. It is just a tremendous idea to have a steam vent. I have seen startups where the vent was not installed and it is a rush, it is a
second thought to install a vent, which is always more expensive. If your contractor is building a header, it is way cheaper to add another flange or to add another tee or whatever to make the vent instead of adding it in the field after everything is done. And hopefully like the header isn't insulated at that point.
It is just way cheaper to plan for it and to have it there. And your startup person, whether that is you, the contractor, or that somebody else, if you are an owner, that startup person is going to be looking for that vent and that vent. You also need to be aware of how much steam you are venting. So as I said before, when you vent steam right out of a pipe, right into the atmosphere, it gets pretty loud.
and if you are around different places, especially residential, and it depends on where you are. Some places are real strict about noise, some places aren't, but if you have a maximum noise that your plant can emit, you will need a silencer for your steam vent. And the silencer is essentially a...
It kind of looks like a blow down separator, but it is essentially a vessel with some baffles in it. And the baffles help to break up the acoustics of the steam and helps to dissipate the steam so that the steam becomes more of a cloud rather than a gas that is rushing out the end of a pipe, which causes the crazy acoustics that I'm talking about.
I think you can look up online on YouTube, like Steamvent. And if you haven't heard of it, there's probably some videos out there of people venting steam right out of pipe. It can get pretty loud. So you will need a silencer. You can build one yourself. If you are a contractor, they are not crazy difficult to build.
There's no real rhyme or reason. You can also buy in from people. It is not gonna be something that, oh, let's buy this last minute. a silencer is gonna be five to $10,000 easy just to start. So it's not something you're wanna leave off. if you are a contractor or a starter person, it is not something that you're wanna add to your scope and just eat depending on what the project calls for.
So you need to make sure that you bring that up in the front. And if it is going to be a permanent installation, then you're to want to add the silencer to the pipe. And a good engineer would do that. But we all know engineers are not perfect, but you would add the silencer to the pipe. So it would be a permanent installation instead of a temporary installation. I have seen some vents that were more temporary and it
while they did have a globe valve off the header, it was ran to just steam hose and then ran to a temporary silencer out in like a parking lot. And that allowed the startup company to do the boiler startup. But then once they were done, that was removed. And that is fine, but now you don't have a steam vent for any kind of boiler maintenance. And doing
boiler maintenance which is mostly combustion and test fire and setting up and making sure your fuels are working correctly and that your steam plant is modulating correctly. It is so much easier to do when you have a place to vent steam rather than relying on the load for the day with manufacturing that load can be anywhere between zero. Oh, you know, we're having PMs today or
it can be 100 % and you don't have any issues of keeping header pressure down and keeping the boilers running. And that is why steam vents off your header, vent, just one vent, but a steam vent off your header is so critical and so important for a boiler startup. And most times it is not thought of until the person who is starting up the boilers walks on site.
And if they are newer, and I understand that, you know, the internet will have you believe that you need 20 years experience to start up a steam boiler, especially a larger one, but people of all kinds of experience start them up. And if you are newer and never done a steam startup, you will walk on site, you'll get everything through, you'll start doing a boil out, you do all this, and then it will occur to you that you don't have anywhere to put the steam.
and then you'll ask the customer or ask the project manager, the contractor, the GC, and then it'll start being this RFI in this issue while you're trying to do the startup, which ends up in delays. Even if they approve changes immediately, the work always takes some time, especially if you have welding that you have to do and...
even if you got to get temporary steam hoses and a silencer like that, that all takes time. And then that will drag out the startup. And obviously the general contractor is not going to want to pay you for that extra time. And they may also question of, why didn't you mention this when you sold us the boilers that you needed a steam vent? And that is why a lot of manuals for boilers will recommend installing a steam vent.
And that is always my suggestion. I would also make it mandatory. If you are a contractor, I would make it mandatory to have a steam vent for boiler startup. makes life so easy on boiler startup. And if you make it mandatory, you know, what is it an extra thousand bucks, let's say of valves and a weld, but
the difference in time savings between having a vent and not having a vent can be huge. There was a boiler setup I did. It was multiple boilers, I believe five boilers. And I was able to manipulate the vent so that I could test all the boilers modulating together, all the boilers going at high fire, all the boilers going at low fire.
the vent was large enough that I could vent steam and there was no load because this was a heating plant and they hadn't finished the connections and done all that so I had to vent steam out of the roof of the building and luckily they had installed a steam vent so that I could manipulate the globe valve and vent steam as I was doing startup on each boiler which made life so easy.
Although they do not have a chain on that one. So I ended up having to use a lift up and down to move the valve open and close, which ended up being a lot of back and forth. But I got through it. There's been other times where I did a boiler startup and their steam vent was really just a end of a header. They just took off the end of a flange of a header bolted on a
gate valve and then they just piped it directly outside with no silencer. They just poked it through the side of the building. It was just like a, know, warehouse, so pretty thin sheet metal building. And this actually vented over railroad tracks. And I found out that a train, there was a, like a yard kind of, so the trains that were coming in and out were going like,
five miles an hour, but I found out that a train will not drive through a cloud of steam that is venting over a railroad yard. So, you know, I figured out how to stop a train with a little steam vent. But that vent, it was the full size of the header and it was pretty oversized. So in order to build any kind of pressure in the header, I only had to crack the valve a little bit, but it was a gate valve, unfortunately.
But it was, you know, it was something that the customer kind of did last minute, but any kind of event, even if the valve is wrong is better than no vent. And in that case, I wouldn't have been able to do the boiler startup because their steam process hadn't even been close to being done yet. They needed to get the boiler started up in order for them to meet a certain.
deadline in the project and in order for you know people to get paid a lot of billing cycles are dependent on the boilers getting started up so that steam vent allowed me to do the boiler startup and keep the whole process moving without saying hey we can't can't do this because I don't have load and there's nothing worse than saying hey I set combustion on low fire and that was all I was able to do
because I didn't have a load, we'll have to come back when there's a load. And now it makes this weird scenario of your company, if you're the startup company, your company can't really bill for the project, yet they want to, and it remains this like, this project is open and you can't really proceed until the customer gets their side done, yet the customer wants you to be there to get the.
Project complete so the boiler startup can be complete so that they can mark that off their schedule and You know if there's a GC they're gonna want to mark that off their schedule if there's a mechanical contractor they're gonna want to mark that off their schedule because mechanical contractors probably Dependent on pay for the boiler startup, you know, that's gonna be a major milestone They're gonna want to make sure that all their steam piping works and everything and if there's no load
and you can't get the full boiler startup. Now it's just like, well, yes, the boiler's run, but they only run in low fire because we didn't have enough load. And it ends up being this really messy situation. And I will tell you from experience that the boiler startup person always loses because on a large project like that, you typically bid the startup pretty tight. Even if you do like, well, it's gonna be two weeks.
Well, you end up finding all these issues with, you know, the boilers and electrical and stuff, not talking to each other. And there's always issues with boiler startup. But when things start getting outside of your control, yes, it's technically not your fault, but you can whine and complain and submit RFIs and do all this stuff. Getting paid for extra time and.
losses and inefficiency is much more difficult than just doing it correctly the first time, which is having an vent just because it is not your fault doesn't mean you will get paid for delays that are not your fault. You can be the best salesperson there is, but most GCs will just be like, well, you quoted the boiler startup, you didn't tell us about this.
And so you just got to kind of suck it up. We don't have any extra money to give you. And what are you going to do? Walk away? know, the GC is probably holding out money from paying you for the final boiler startup. So you kind of have to bend their will. You don't have a lot of leverage and you don't want to take it to court because everybody loses in court. There is no winner except the lawyers. So that is...
The number one make or break for a startup also reoccurring every year for boiler maintenance, preventative maintenance, for combustion, for any kind of testing of the boilers. A steam vent is always very, very helpful and every boiler service person or combustion person will be glad to see a steam vent on the header.
and that will make their life much, much easier. But you gotta remember two things. One, you gotta valve them properly after you size it properly. You can oversize the vent to where you're barely cracking open the valve and your boilers can't keep up. So you wanna size the vent correctly and you also wanna make sure that you have the proper valves. So I would recommend a gate valve and a globe valve.
two valves, you always want a regulating valve and an isolation valve. And then ideally if those are up high, you're going to have a chain on them. If they are down low, like the drop headers that are getting a little bit more common, that there's kind of floor mounted headers about waist height, those kind of headers, it would be easy to manipulate the valves by hand. So you don't need a chain. And then if you do have any kind of noise restrictions,
you will need a silencer at the outlet and that silencer will have to be sized for the amount of steam that is going to be coming out of that vent. And that is something an engineer can help you with when they are sizing the header and sizing the vent. So that is all I have for you today. On your next steam project, make sure you have a steam vent coming off your header and pipe.
to a safe location where you can vent steam. It is critical for that steam vent to be able to get rid of steam so that you can go through the full startup process of the boiler and make sure that the boiler is working correctly without having the startup person to have to rely on outside forces that they can't always control in order to do their job. And that is what steam vent helps to prevent.
So if you enjoyed this episode or any other episode, please rate the Boiler Wild podcast five stars. If you have any questions, can DM me on LinkedIn or email me eric.johnson at boilearn.com I appreciate you for listening and stay wild.
