Eric Johnson (00:03)
Welcome back to Boiler Wild. My name is Eric Johnson. On this podcast, talk about boiler industry topics as well as personal development. You may be wondering, the name is a little weird, a little out there. I think it's a little amazing. I've had some other people tell me they like the name too, but the name of the podcast, Boiler Wild, Wild actually stands for work hard, invest yourself, lead others, and develop yourself into a person of excellence. Always strive to get better. And if you're listening to this podcast, I hope.
Eric Johnson (00:33)
you want to get better in whatever area of your life you got we gotta have goals, we gotta have dreams and aspirations. And just because you work around boilers, burners, steam, hydronics and any of that doesn't mean you can't go out and achieve big things. So today today I wanna talk about what I call the point of no return. And this is a thing that is typically unique to boilers.
Eric Johnson (01:02)
So I will get into that more, but when you are working on like an air conditioner or even like just a residential furnace, if you do that kind of work, or you know, maybe a commercial air handler, you can easily shut down the the air handler and fix it and then turn it back on, have an issue, shut it down, fix it, turn it back on. Same thing with air conditioners.
Eric Johnson (01:30)
Unless you are having to pull refrigerant out, then it's a little bit more work. But you know, you can still, if you make a mistake, re pull the refrigerant out and all this stuff. With boilers, it's a little different. And I'm specifically talking about steam boilers, but a large hot water boiler, this would also apply, although it would be slightly easier to get past this point. And what I'm talking about of the point is no return.
Eric Johnson (01:57)
Is when you have officially put heat back into the boiler. So when you are doing an annual maintenance, you shut down the boiler and or this could be for any maintenance, it doesn't have to be annual, but at a minimum, typically a high-pressure steam boiler is going to be shut down at least annually, and you need 24 to 48 hours to cool down the boiler. The boiler gets cool.
Eric Johnson (02:26)
You open up the fireside, you open up the water side, you're able to inspect everything. And this is the time that you need to make sure that you are dotting your I's and crossing your T's. Why? Because if you are going through your fireside inspection and you're doing a confined space inspection and you you know, I'm gonna make this fix, and then you make the fix, but then you're not quite sure that you made the correct fix.
Eric Johnson (02:56)
Or you you you re-roll some tubes or whatever and you're you do a hydro, it will seal up when the boiler gets hot. It's just a little weeping out of the tubes. It's good enough. Or on the water side, you have your pressure control tree, all your pressure controls, the operating control, the
Eric Johnson (03:24)
If you have it, maybe a level transducer, you have a high limit control, anything that's gonna measure pressure, anything that's gonna be not have a valve on it, those are critical. You need to check all that piping, you need to flush all that piping, you need to check all those pigtails. If there are pigtails, you need check everything because you need to have the mentality of will this thing operate for an another year.
Eric Johnson (03:54)
Because I obviously nobody wants to shut down for maintenance. That is unplanned. So we need to make sure that we are checking everything, that we're documenting everything, that we are inspecting everything. And if you don't flush your control lines, if you don't flush your pigtails, if you don't inspect that part of the boiler, and you may be thinking to yourself, Well, I do that. Of course everybody does that. No. Not everybody does that. I've seen it.
Eric Johnson (04:22)
Not everybody does it. That is not a hundred percent normal to do. And a lot of companies will get quotes from different companies and there'll be different prices. Some companies for an annual inspection, they will open up the boiler, the inspector will pass it, they'll close the boiler, they'll fire it and walk away. And then other ones do it correctly and actually check everything on the boiler and then do the combustion and everything. But
Eric Johnson (04:51)
The point of no return is it is super easy to check all that stuff, but you close up the boiler, you fire it, you get a little bit of steam pressure in there, and then you wonder why your operating control isn't working. And then you find out that the pigtail under my operating control is plugged. Well, I have 100 psi of steam now on my boiler. Well.
Eric Johnson (05:22)
That ten minute job to take off the pigtail, check it, clean it, or replace the pigtail now turned into a couple hours. And you can't just say, we're just gonna get to that later. No, the operating control doesn't work. You can't run the boiler now. So you either have to power cool the boiler, which means essentially you're gonna somehow dump steam
Eric Johnson (05:52)
You're gonna turn on the fan and hopefully not thermal stress the boiler. And you gotta and this will take a couple hours to get the steam pressure off the boiler. And it also depends on how big the boiler is, whether it's a water tube and a fire tube as well. But whatever you're doing is probably not gonna be great for the boiler. But in any case, that little operation that you missed.
Eric Johnson (06:20)
Can screw up your whole day. It can screw up the customer's day because they were expecting the boiler to be online by 5 PM and they have, you know, production coming in ready to go for the second shift. And now it's not ready to go. And for whatever reason, the boiler's not ready to go because you didn't do all your checks. And I've seen this time and time again. I've I can think of one time.
Eric Johnson (06:50)
specifically off the top of my head back when I was a service technician, I
Eric Johnson (12:01)
One example I can think of when I was doing service back in the good old days is I had facility and
Eric Johnson (12:20)
This was after somebody else. And I was there really just to help and supervise. But I just asked, hey, did you do this? Did you do this? Yup, yup, yup, yup, yup. And turns out some stuff wasn't done. Got the boiler back on. And I am now there by myself. It is a little later in the day.
Eric Johnson (12:48)
after four o'clock and turns out that the boiler doesn't shut down because the operating control is not sensing the steam pressure. And I look at the control tree and this is a standard fire tube 200 horsepower boiler and unfortunately there's no load on this boiler and I couldn't get a load.
Eric Johnson (13:16)
Due to the situation, but I'm looking at it and I'm like, huh, they said this, they said that. And why is there why is this operating control not working? So spend a couple hours. The boiler had to be running that day. So I spend a couple hours bleeding steam and getting steam off the boiler to the point where I can start playing around with it. So I I unwire the operating control.
Eric Johnson (13:46)
Take it off and I maybe only have a pound on the boiler at this point and take off the operating control just to see if I can get steam flow out of the pigtail. Nope, zero steam flow. And it was at that point I was like, pigtail's plugged. So then I inspect the pigtail and you can see the pigtail had just
Eric Johnson (14:13)
Plug solid and typically what I've seen with steam boilers is everything will be working and everything works because it is hot, it is moving the material around inside the boiler, the the corrosion material, if that makes sense. The like when a pigtail plugs up, it may not plug up
Eric Johnson (14:40)
when the boiler is hot, when the boiler's online, but the second you cool the boiler and leave the boiler off for twenty four to forty eight hours, that pigtail and all the stuff in it can easily solidify in the center pinhole. I don't know if you've ever seen a pigtail that is plugged up. Typically it just moves from the outside in. So on the inside diameter, it'll make buildup and eventually
Eric Johnson (15:07)
It'll meet in the center and there'll just be a tiny little pinhole that pressure can pass through, but then that pinhole will seal up. And now your pigtail is 100% plugged and your pressure control won't work. So in this case, the pigtail was a hundred percent plugged. I ended up replacing the pigtail and got it on, but it that ended up costing me about four four hours.
Eric Johnson (15:35)
of extra work just because the pigtail was never checked or it was checked very haphazardly and now the pressure control didn't work. Same thing with internal inspection. If you do not properly repair a refractory on the interior of a boiler or inspect the tubes or inspect
Eric Johnson (16:04)
On a water tube boiler, if you inspect the fireside properly and you heat up that boiler again, any amount of heat added to that boiler will make entering that boiler extremely difficult and/or impossible again. So you have to make sure that you are doing everything possible that you need to, and you are dotting your I's, crossing your T's of
Eric Johnson (16:31)
Yes, this boiler is good to run. If not, taking pictures of questionable parts, questionable refractory, taking measurements, doing all this stuff, because once that boiler is fired and there's heat in the boiler, it is incredibly difficult and time consuming to undo that point. You can crawl in and out of a boiler, you can take stuff apart easily when the there is no steam pressure on it.
Eric Johnson (16:58)
But once you put steam pressure on it, once you put heat in a boiler, the metal heats up, the water heats up. It now takes way, way longer to undo that to typically do a little tiny job that you forgot about. So once again, I see this done with pressure controls. So you have to think of a mindset of if I am gonna do an annual maintenance on a steam boiler and it's
Eric Johnson (17:26)
typically only gonna be shut down and opened. It may be shut down just periodically, but they're not opening it up for maintenance. So if we're shutting down the steam boiler once a year, I need to make sure that every single component is going to last a year. And you can't have the mentality of, that looks good enough, or that has some blockage, but it's fine. No. You have to make sure that there's zero blockage and everything
Eric Johnson (17:55)
is essentially brand new in the way it looks as far as piping. You know you may have some corrosion in the piping. That needs to be written up. Hey, this piping is bad. It is corroded. It may leak soon or we need to replace it now. Like there's all this kind of stuff where some people I've seen where they will think, Well, it looks fine for now. We'll see when
Eric Johnson (18:23)
you know, if it fails. Well, I don't agree with that mentality because that's fine if you have a bunch of extra boilers or you're, you know, working at a small time facility and stuff. The the cost typically of getting a new part and replacing it and the little time extra spent of doing it correctly while the boiler's down is way cheaper.
Eric Johnson (18:53)
And way more efficient than shutting down the boiler again.
Eric Johnson (19:05)
Getting another service call or more parts out there at a different time and then replacing it, restarting the boiler, getting the steam back up to pressure and everything, like it just takes way longer and you're doing over double amount of the work just for a tiny little job. And that's why with annual maintenance
Eric Johnson (19:34)
You need to be making sure that everything is correct, everything is good, and with the mindset of will this last for a whole nother year? Same thing with level controllers. So level controllers, differential pressure controls, they are typically found on DA tanks, feed water tanks, and you have a high leg and a low leg. They are also found on boilers.
Eric Johnson (20:03)
They require maintenance. If they get plugged up in the legs, they don't work and then you'll have issues and there's no valves to isolate them from the tanks and you will have to shut down and pull s the steam pressure off the tank. It's a little bit easier to clear out, however, still requires the ideal maintenance conditions of no pressure.
Eric Johnson (20:32)
And you gotta make sure that the lines are clear. You'll have your reference leg. Obviously, you gotta fill that up again. I won't get too much into that, but essentially a differential transmitter does a math equation of one leg minus another leg, and it takes the difference of pressure between the two columns of water and determines the water level in your boiler or in your DA tank.
Eric Johnson (20:58)
And if one of those legs gets plugged up, that math equation changes and it'll tell you a water level that is not correct. And it'll either try to overfill or underfill your boiler. And I've seen companies that don't flush those lines, and it's typically just due to the a person that doesn't understand what those lines are for or why they would be plugged and everything. You need to flush all the lines. If you have steam flow.
Eric Johnson (21:28)
transmitters, you gotta make sure that all those lines are flushed and plug or not plugged and inspect all those lines, inspect inspect any line that is gonna be a measurement because if those measurement lines get plugged, you are going to have issues. And once you have steam flowing again, it is infinitely harder to
Eric Johnson (21:53)
Pull apart those lines. Another part of this is this is typically not on the boiler side but on the steam side. But if you're doing a steam shutdown and if you have the proper isolation, make sure you are pulling apart your PRV and checking the orfices. So a typical mechanical actuated PRV that uses pressure, you know, like the typical ones from Spence and Watts McDaniel.
Eric Johnson (22:23)
Hopefully y'all know what I'm talking about. They're typically seen in like a reducing station. You can also have back pressure valves on boilers. And it works the opposite of a pressure reducing station. It keeps the pressure in the boiler and will only open after the boiler reaches a certain steam pressure. Those have little sensing lines, those have little orifices on the fittings. And if those orifice fittings get plugged up.
Eric Johnson (22:52)
The valves won't work and you will either get steam trapped in the boiler, or if you have a PRV station, you will have steam not properly getting reduced and flowing to the other side of the PRV station. This is typically easier fixed with because there should be isolation valves. But as we all know, isolation valves.
Eric Johnson (23:19)
Do not always hold. And when you have a six inch isolation valve and you're trying to pull apart a little PRV fitting, a tiny little steam leak can be a lot and it can be hazardous, even though it's a tiny little leak through the valve. And that little leak makes it very, very difficult to pull the fittings apart. And you have to be very careful. I've done it before. It is not ideal. It is probably not safe.
Eric Johnson (23:47)
But you gotta do what you gotta do. However, it is way easier to do when there is no steam pressure and it takes half the time to check everything, to flush everything. And it is just part of it should be the standard procedures of checking things as you go through the system when the steam pressure is off. But typically, if you are just shutting down a boiler, you're gonna be isolated at the header and all the valves around the boiler.
Eric Johnson (24:14)
you're not gonna be looking at the steam system. If you're if you're doing a full steam shutdown, you're gonna wanna look at your PRVs and other flow transmitters and everything to make sure that they are all working good. And if they're not working good, you need to make notes about them before that shutdown so that you don't forget anything. And that is very important. But with the boiler, the point of no return, you heat that boiler up, you're planning on at minimum
Eric Johnson (24:42)
three to four hours of having to cool that boiler down again if you s put steam pressure on that boiler if you have to re enter that boiler if you have another tube leak that you didn't think you had. And while it will happen and you can get the job done and all this stuff, it is not ideal. You'll probably want to go home or you just say, we'll have to come the next day but then the customer
Eric Johnson (25:11)
If they have a bunch of extra boilers, then they don't really care. But if they don't and they really needed that boiler that day, they're gonna be inconvenienced. You're staying late. Of course, you're gonna miss your kids for a soccer game and all this stuff. Like it's it's not ideal. And just taking the extra time and extra care to make sure that you are inspecting all the little things, taking off your pressure controls.
Eric Johnson (25:40)
And this is actually why I like pressure control tree or pressure control setup on a boiler without pigtails. I know some people just religiously put pigtails on it, but if you don't put pigtails on it and you make it like a drop header with a trap on it, and the entire header piping arrangement becomes the pigtail and becomes the water seal.
Eric Johnson (26:07)
You don't need pigtails, and now you can use tiny little quarter inch, just straight pipe nipples on your pressure controls, or if the pressure controls are half inch, you can use half inch. But you can easily make it much easier to clean and much easier to inspect. And I've never seen a straight quarter inch pipe nipple get plugged up versus a
Eric Johnson (26:38)
pigtail because the pig the pigtails will always hold water in them whether you drain the column or not because of just how they are unless you take the pigtail apart and with that that then it gets debris in it and they'll plug up. But if you take just apart a the piping of a drop header that I like to call or a water seal header
Eric Johnson (27:06)
Whatever you want to call it, where the header is piped so that it becomes the water seal instead of the pigtails to keep direct steam, heat, and from reaching the pressure controls. You'll have if you flush it out, you know, you take the two plugs off the ends and you flush it out, you will have black water come out, you'll have some debris come out, but it'll clear up pretty quickly.
Eric Johnson (27:33)
And I typically like a three quarter header on that at minimum. It makes it easier to see down it. It gives you more space. It is less likely to plug. I've seen some ones that are half inch. That is not ideal. My ideal setup would be three quarter header and you use three quarter to quarter inch Ts so that you are not
Eric Johnson (27:59)
having extra fittings some people will use three quarter by three quarter t's and then three quarter to quarter bushings you're adding more fittings to leak more fittings to buy but three quarter to quarter inch tees are not standard buy and off the shelf and that's why a lot of people don't use them but anyways that's another side project and side topic but
Eric Johnson (28:24)
Make sure you're inspecting those, make sure you're repairing your refractory correctly, make sure you're taking your pictures, make sure you are sealing your hand holes, especially your bottom hand holes. It is very, very difficult to fill up a boiler, especially if you're filling the boiler from a DA that is already hot because it's feeding other boilers and you're filling your boiler with two hundred and twenty five degree water and your bottom handhole starts leaking when you have the boiler half full.
Eric Johnson (28:52)
Yes, you can dump the boiler, but now the boiler is hot. And dumping the boiler, you're wasting a lot of water, you'll you're wasting a lot of chemical. And all because you didn't want to crawl along the floor and get a little wet and dirty, to make sure that that handhole surface was clean, you didn't run your finger on the inside, maybe some hand sa sandcloth on the inside, making sure that there's no scale buildup on that surface, making sure that the handhole plate is proper and that the handhole plate is.
Eric Johnson (29:21)
centered inside the handhole and then you're properly tightening that and making sure the gasket is all aligned and proper. Overlooking proper handhole placement and manway placement with the gasket that can easily screw you over, especially if you get some pressure on the boiler. I've had manway leak with 10 pounds of steam pressure on it and there's not much you can do.
Eric Johnson (29:49)
Sometimes the manway is damaged and you don't notice but a lot of times and I don't I don't wanna just blame others with this. It's it's my I take responsibility for not checking, but if you're working with somebody else and somebody else puts in the manway and then you go on and then now the manway leaks and you look at it and you're like, well the gasket
Eric Johnson (30:13)
wasn't centered and you know it's missing over on this side or you put in the manway crooked and didn't tighten it like this. It doesn't really matter at that point because the manway is leaking and tightening it no matter what, it won't seal up. And now you gotta cool down the boiler enough in order to pull out the manway. I don't know if you ever tried to pull out a manway w even with just hot water in the boiler, the amount of residual water vapor
Eric Johnson (30:41)
that is coming out of that manway when it's on the top of the boiler. And I'm talking about a fire tube boiler in this case. The amount of just residual water vapor that is just rising out of that boiler makes it very, very difficult. You gotta have some welding gloves on, a face shield, long sleeves, probably attach a wire to the hand handle. Like it's super difficult to do, super
Eric Johnson (31:09)
unsafe to do safely. but sometimes you just gotta do what you gotta do. But if you just take the extra couple minutes to make sure your manway is properly centered and properly tightened and that the surfaces are clean. I've seen people not clean the surfaces of a manway and leave old gasket on the surface. And that old gasket they just think well it'll be fine. The the new gasket will just smash into the old gasket.
Eric Johnson (31:37)
little bits and it'll seal up. No, it won't seal up. And now it's leaking. Also I've seen this with McDonald low water cutoff controls, McDonald Miller controls. And you'll have like a one fifty head. And if you know that that will be a machined circular surface and it'll have a cross hatch in it. But on ones that are pretty worn down the cross hatching will have worn out and you'll say, well, you know
Eric Johnson (32:07)
You should replace it, but not every customer has all the money in the world to just replace parts that aren't necessarily bad. And people will leave old gasket on those surfaces. And that that surface is a very high tolerance surface where you have a gasket that is thinner or as thick as a sixteenth of an inch. I don't know how thick they are, but they are very, very thin. The little eight hole gaskets.
Eric Johnson (32:37)
And then you have two surfaces coming together and there's no playing those surfaces. I believe it's cast iron, some kind of cast iron. It's not gonna bend or anything. So if you have extra material on those metal surfaces that is not planned and you try to put a gasket on that, there's not a lot of extra squish on that gasket that is just gonna take up all this extra space.
Eric Johnson (33:03)
Then I've seen people say, well, well, you you just need to put on some larger gasket or they'll put on some like make a gasket, they'll use RTV and all this stuff. You are if you increase the measurement between those two bolting surfaces, you are now increasing the likelihood that you're gonna have a leak because of due to the gasket blowing out, you're not gonna have the proper clamping force.
Eric Johnson (33:32)
also changing the measurement of where that float is based on the water level so I would not recommend that if if you cannot get those two surfaces to seal and you have cleaned the surfaces all the way putting in a thicker gasket is not recommended you need to replace the bowl or the the head of the float andor both but I do understand you know things aren't always perfect
Eric Johnson (34:01)
However, taking that a little extra time to make sure that that surface is clean and perfect is great. And it saves a lot of time. I remember another service call and I I don't even understand how I remember all this stuff. But I remember another service call. I got called out to a chemical facility and walk in the room, they have I think it's two hundred horsepower, fire tube boiler.
Eric Johnson (34:29)
And the in house maintenance person had put the boiler back together and I'm not saying this is his fault. He probably shouldn't have put the boiler back together. He doesn't know, but he was just told by his boss to put it back together to close it up. And he had not cleaned the surface of the McDonald Miller one fifty seven bowl, I believe, or one fifty head float. I don't know, McDonald Miller's sizing and stuff on there.
Eric Johnson (34:59)
model numbers is super confusing, but the float, once again the same surface that I was talking about, he had not cleaned the gasket surface properly and had tightened down the
Eric Johnson (35:11)
the float side not evenly and it was closer on one side versus the other due to the gasket surfaces. And he was just trying to tighten it more and more and more. But once you have a a leak, no amount of tightening is gonna that fix that leak. That there should be no steam leak even with a minor amount of bolting pressure between those s two surfaces since those two surfaces are machined and you have just a very, very thin gasket between it.
Eric Johnson (35:42)
So we had to power cool the boiler, get the steam pressure off of it, unbolt that. There was tons of extra gasket on that and this guy thought that, well I I f I figured this extra gasket that I put on would be able to seal that up and that I'd just be able to over tighten it. He was wrong and you know, I took the time to educate him and say, Hey, you know, this is what it's supposed to be like and this is how you do this, but you know what?
Eric Johnson (36:13)
It you know, it was a service call for me, extra money for the company, but it was an extra expense for his company, not that they really cared, but it's an extra couple hours that could have been avoided if he took an extra ten minutes to clean off that gasket surface. And that's why cleaning gasket surfaces and making sure your hand holes, manways, water side is all good to go before you
Eric Johnson (36:40)
Fire the boiler before you fill up that boiler, it makes it makes the difference. I've been burned one too many times of putting in hand holes by feel and not looking at not inspecting it with a mirror, making sure that there isn't a little piece of scale that gets put under the gasket and now you filled up the boiler and now it's leaking and now you gotta crawl under there and try to fix it.
Eric Johnson (37:07)
handhole on the belly of a boiler that's leaking with two hundred and twenty degree water. It is not ideal, very dangerous and not recommended. And that's why you need to make sure that you are doing everything possible to do things correctly before the point of no return. And it'll make your life so much easier because after you fire the boiler you are increasing your statistical odds.
Eric Johnson (37:34)
To have things go right and not have any pop-ups. But this is really why you have to have a little experience. And this is why if you're an owner or somebody hiring out for your boiler maintenance, why this is the difference between a HVAC company that has guys that know how to turn some wrenches versus a boiler service company that actually knows what
Eric Johnson (38:03)
they need to do during a boiler annual inspection or all the extra stuff that's not in the manufacturer's manual or all the stuff that is special for your equipment and to make sure that it is correct, it is clean correctly, it is maintained correctly, and that your boiler is put back together correctly so that you don't have issues with gaskets leaking and gaskets blowing out and all the similar stuff.
Eric Johnson (38:32)
either immediately or right after within the week and I've seen so many issues with stuff like that of
Eric Johnson (38:45)
people not doing that and I just want you to be educated and avoid those issues and be the person that does it right the first time and doesn't screw themselves over by having to wait a couple hours to cool down a boiler to do a ten minute job that should have been done before the point of no return. So with that I will leave you at that. Hopefully you learned something. If you're an experienced boiler person, you're probably
Eric Johnson (39:14)
Chuckling to yourself and thinking about the one time that you've screwed yourself over of this topic that I've talked about. If you have a time like that, please comment on the podcast app or if you don't want a public comment, you can send me an email, Eric.johnson at boilern.com or DM me on LinkedIn. If if we're not connected on LinkedIn, look me up, connect with me. Happy to connect with you and hear your experience.
Eric Johnson (39:43)
If you've gotten this far, thank you. Please rate this podcast five stars on your podcast app. That helps me and that helps other people find this podcast. I appreciate you all listening and stay wild.
