New Yorker Boiler Question

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bsimms89

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I have a New Yorker oil boiler from the mid 80's (hose built in 1985) on a hot water system with a Beckett burner, I can get the model number at home later. It was recently cleaned and I have a few questions about it. I had been using my oil company to do my yearly services since I bought my house 3 years ago (never had a house or boiler before so I didn't know what needed to be done and just watched them do whatever they did). But their oil prices were getting ridiculous so I left them ($3.35 a gallon now while everyone else is around $2.05) and just had a local guy come in to do a service.

He took the top off the boiler and vacuumed it all out (something the oil company never did in the last 3 years since I've owned it because i was watching them) and there was a bit of soot piled up there. Then when he took the top off the boiler had like 20 vertical tubes in a grid pattern that extended down into the firebox, about 8 of these tube had spiral baffles in them, but not all, and they were randomly laid out which ones had them (not in a pattern or symmetrical or anything). The service guy said it was pretty dirty and could also tell it hadn't been cleaned in there in some time and he pulled the baffles out of the tubes that had them and brushed out all of the tubes before reinstalling the baffles in the ones that had them, the tubes that don't have the baffles are just a straight tube from the firebox up to the top of the boiler. Finally he cleaned and vacuumed the firebox, replaced the nozzles and changed the oil filter and gaskets. He didn't do an efficiency test which next year I think is something I'm going to want.

My question is should all these tubes have had the baffles in them? Had some been removed or misplaced over the years? They looked just like these
http://www.albrohvac.com/ProductInfo.aspx?code=SB114X16&type=0&eq=&desc=SPIRAL-BOILER-BAFFLE-1-1/4"-X-16"&key=it
http://www.albrohvac.com/ProductInfo.aspx?code=SB114X16&type=0&eq=&desc=SPIRAL-BOILER-BAFFLE-1-1/4"-X-16"&key=it

Should I get matching baffles to place in the tubes that don't have them?

The oil company last year was telling me my efficiency of the boiler was under 60% and that he didn't know exactly what is was because his equipment couldn't read any lower and was trying to sell me a new boiler but I passed. My friend who recommended this guy said when they switched from the oil company to him he reduced their jet by 3 sizes and their efficiency increased, and I heard the same from my sister's boyfriend who used the oil company but then switched to someone else and learned the oil company had installed a larger size jet than the factory recommended.

It seems that this oil company has just been making everyone's equipment run less efficiently, I am more curious about the baffles though as it looks different than most pictures I've seen online and googling boiler spiral baffles only brings up the site I linked to above. I'm just wondering if this boiler should have them in all the tubes and since they don't have them all the hot air is just going straight up the top of the boiler?

BTW if anyone wants to know the name of the oil company that was doing this to everyone it's Petro.
 

Dana

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A few missing baffles isn't going to drop the combustion efficiency to under 60%, but it's clearly past time to be thinking about a new boiler. The original boiler is also likely to be ridiculously oversized for the load too. Rather than let some hack figure out how to size it correctly, run some numbers yourself. Even the smallest oil boilers are usually oversized for the heat load of an average mid 1980s house, but out of an abundance of sloth people just took a WAG based on square footage of the house, and upsized it from there. How big is this house?

Sometimes boilers get oversized when the domestic hot water is being served by an embedded coil in the boiler (which pretty much suck, on a number of accounts), and the larger thermal mass & burner delivers somewhat better hot water performance. Oversizing the boiler for the heat load ends up delivering much lower AFUE efficiency than if it were right-sized. AFUE testing presumes at duty-cycle that corresponds to 1.7x oversizing for the load at the 99% outside design temperature, and ASHRAE recommends no more than 1.4x oversizing factor for optimal comfort, efficiency, and equipment longevity.

In any event, a 32 year old oil-boiler doesn't owe you anything, and none are operating anywhere near it's nameplate AFUE. It's beyond it's useful life-cycle, and isn't worth investing money in other than what it takes to stay warm for the rest of the heating season.

First, figure out how much of what type of heat emitter you have on each zone, if broken up into zones. You probably have fin-tube baseboard, not radiators, not tall convectors. Measure them up, rounding to the nearest foot of baseboard, and report back.

Since you have a heating history on the place we can take a shot at calculating the heat load using the fuel use against heating degree-day data. With a sub-60% boiler this method won't be super-accurate, but it provide a firm upper bound. If you've been using a regular fill-up service, they usually stamp a "K-factor" on the billing slip. A couple of mid-to-late winter K-factors and your ZIP code (for estimating your 99% outside design temperature) would be enough information to go with.

If it's easy to do, take picture of the top of the boiler showing the tubes, as well as a shot of the name plate showing the model name, BTU-in, BTU-out, etc.

When we have a handle on the heat load and the radiation/heat-emitters it'll be possible to make more reasoned suggestions on what to replace this thing with when the time comes.
 

bsimms89

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You're right in assuming its baseboard heat, the house is a 2 story center hall colonial, approximately 2,400 square feet not including the basement. The basement is finished and is under about 80% of the house. The house has 3 zones of heating, 1 straight baseboard along the length of the basement on a simple high voltage thermostat. 1 zone on the first floor that was on a high voltage stat and had a second stat for the central air but i had that moved and put in a transformer to install a low voltage stat to run both on a programmable stat, and 1 zone upstairs that was already a combined low voltage stat for the AC and heat. So it's 3 zones in total.

I can get a measurement of just how many feet of baseboards are in each zone this weekend. I didn't get a chance to take pics of the boiler as I was working late last night and will also get that this weekeend, and my oil company didn't list a K-factor on the bills (they actually didn't even put how many gallons were delivered on the bill or at what price, the only place they left the amount filled and the price was on the slip they left when they filled it which sometimes was on the front stoop, or in the door or even on the tank fill up tube), but I have all my fill up info and made a spreadsheet and got degree day infomation from http://www.degreedays.net/# so below I have attached a pic from the spreadsheet showing my k factor for each period between deliveries.

My house is also really drafty, there is a bay window on the front of my den that wasn't original and is extremely drafty that I think has very little insulation in it, my kitchen is actually cantilevered about 4' out from the foundation wall edge just out over the ground (every house in the neighborhood was build like this, idk why) and the kitchen sinks lines were freezing because of this so I installed pex lines. My shower upstairs has it's water lines running up an outside wall and last winter those almost froze but a valve did crack and the shower was stuck dripping and when I had the plumber come the next day to fix it when he took the knob off the shower we learned there was no insulation on the outside wall the shower is against, and finally the walk in close for the master bedroom is over the garage and does have some insulation but is hot and humid in the summer and freezing in the winter but does have about 3' or baseboard in it which seems just to be a waste of heat.
K factor calculation 64%.png
 

Dana

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We still need the ZIP code (or the 99% outside design temp) to get anywhere with this. The nameplate on the boiler with the input and output BTUs is useful too.

K-factor== base 65F HDD/gallon, so it's an easy conversion to make, but unfortunately they're one of the oil delivery services that don't provide that information.

A typical tight mid-80s 2x6/R19 house would come in between 12-15 BTU/hr @ 0F per square foot of above-grade conditioned space, but a wretchedly air leaky one with insulation gaps could be north of 25 BTU/hr per square foot @ 0F. Based on your description I'd hazard that your 2400 footer will come in between 50- 60,000 BTU/hr @ 0F, but if you got serious about weatherization upgrades you can probably bring it under 40,000 BTU/hr.

The existing beastie boiler is probably something like 150,000 BTU/hr, maybe bigger (which is why you can still heat the place at sub-60% efficiency) whereas the smallest oil boilers out there are in the 60,000 BTU/hr-out range, and will likely be the more appropriate choice. Even if it's marginal for the heat load at the current condition of the house, it's WELL worth fixing the air leaks and insulation gaps, and there is likely to be NYSERDA subsidy for some of that work.
 

bsimms89

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My zip code is 11790 and I calculated my K factor for each delivery period shown highlighted in the table in my last post, it was usually in the low 4's in the winter. I can get the info on the boiler tonight, but I think you're right I'm pretty sure I remember it saying 140,000 BTUs on it I think. I just realized through PSEG I can get a free "Home Performance with ENERGY STAR" assessment. I think I might apply for that and see what they some back with my leakiness.
 

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The 99% outside design temp for almost all of L.I. is +15F, which is 50F heating degrees below the presumptive 65F heating ^cooling balance point.

Shoulder season K-factors have the greatest amount of error but if we look at the most recent four and average them it'll be good enough to work with. That works out to about 5.0 HDD/gallon, which is 0.20 gallons/HDD.

Assuming 138,000 BTU/gallon and raw combustion efficiency of 60%, thats 0.60 x 138,000 BTU= 82,800 BTU per gallons, so you're at 0.20 x 82,800= 16,560 BTU/HDD, or (/24=) 690 BTU per degree hour.

At 50 heating degrees that becomes an implied 99% heat load of 50F x 690=

34,500 BTU/hr @ +15F


At 0f it would be 65F heating degrees x 690= 44,850 BTU/hr @ 0F, so you're doing somewhat better than my WAG on the overall thermal performance of the house, but there could be significant error in that 60% efficiency number too. But even if we assumed (a totally unrealistic) 85%, that's an implied heat load of 34,500 x 85/60 =48,875 BTU/hr @ +15F.

ASHRAE recommends 1.4x oversizing (max), so for heating equipment ideally you'd be looking at something like 1.4 x 34,500= 48,300 BTU/hr of output, which would pretty much cover the load if that boiler is magically performing as if it were right-sized, and brand new.

But the smallest oil boilers out there are in the 60,000 BTU/hr output range (say the value-priced but quite decent 3-plate Biasi B10/3, with a ~0.5 gph nozzle), which is a bigger oversizing factor than ASHRAE, but with a roughly a 1.7x oversizing factor from the fuel-use load estimate it should be able to hit it's AFUE numbers, (since AFUE testing presumes 1.7x oversizing.)

To hit the AFUE numbers for boilers with somewhat larger burners would require heat purge controls, and maybe even a buffering thermal mass, the approach taken with the System 2000 EK1 & EK2 or Burnham MPO-IQ boilers. (Again, the smallest of the series would be the better than anything larger.) There are others.

How are you currently heating domestic hot water?

Is natural gas available? There are a number of condensing natural gas boilers that can be right-sized to your load, if you have enough baseboard on each zone, which is probably the case, and even if the radiation is too small and would cause a condensing boiler to short-cycle, using a condensing gas tank type water heater can work, but we'd need to run the napkin math on that.

Do you have/need/want air conditioning?
 

NY_Rob

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...My friend who recommended this guy said when they switched from the oil company to him he reduced their jet by 3 sizes and their efficiency increased, and I heard the same from my sister's boyfriend who used the oil company but then switched to someone else and learned the oil company had installed a larger size jet than the factory recommended.
It seems that this oil company has just been making everyone's equipment run less efficiently...
I work out in Riverhead, I have also heard the same for the east end oil co's. They oversize the jet causing you to burn more fuel.
Sneaky bastards!

Do you have gas on your street?
I live just a few mi. south of you and we all mostly use gas here as it's clean, less expensive and easier on equipment.
 

Dana

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BTW: The effects of oversizing on efficiency can be seen in this Broohaven National Laboratories study from about a decade ago. See Table 3.

Looking at Units #1 and #2, even if you had 78-84% steady state efficiency (instead of <60%), at 3x oversizing the "as-used AFUE" would be on the order 10 percentage points below the nameplate AFUE(!).

With a heat load of 35K, and a boiler output of 140K you're at 4x oversizing, which puts you even further over the knee of the curve, with an even bigger performance hit and probably taking something like a 15% hit in AFUE efficiency relative to the steady state combustion efficiency.

So on an annualized basis your ~60% measured steady state efficiency becomes something like 45% AFUE, which is evident in your extremely low shoulder season K-factors.

A 1.7x oversized 85% efficiency dumb boiler like the Biasi B10/3 should cut your oil consumption by nearly half (!). With a slightly oversized boiler with heat-purging controls (like the smallest System 2000 or MPO-IQ) it could be slightly more than half.

Unit # 3 in that study was in fact a heat-purging System 2ooo, which at 3x oversizing takes less than a 2% hit in as-used AFUE. A Burnham MPO-IQ s AFUE derating with oversizing would be similar, provided there enough baseboard that it doesn't short-cycle (there probably is, but we'll see), especially if installed with an indirect fired hot water heater for the domestic hot water to give it more load.
 

bsimms89

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I'd love to get gas, thats what my parents and sister have. My girlfriends brother is actually a foreman for National Grid and works installing and repairing gas lines and he looked up the nearest line for me. There is a main at the cross street at the end of my block, but my house is a half mile down the street, so unless I can get a ton of people to request it I'm not getting gas anytime soon
 

bsimms89

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As far as the hot water, initially when the house was built the boiler created the hot water for the house as well. Sometime recently there was a separate 50 gallon oil burning hot water heater installed and the hot water is no longer supplied by the boiler so once the heating season is done just the hot water heater runs in the summer and the boiler is inactive.
 

NY_Rob

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^ maybe a good time to put out feelers to the neighbors?
They may all be tired of the oil co. tricks by now and ready for something better.

My gas fired boiler lasted 50+ years with hardly any issues.
 

bsimms89

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There's 14 houses between me and the end of the street to where the main is, and that just on my side of the street. I don't know what percentage they need to request it before they'll install a line. Also my girlfriends brother said they have so much work installing new lines still that it'll be 30 years until they're caught up with all the current requests on the island.

Also the town just paved my street for the first time in like 20 years last summer and he says they're not allowed to rip up a new street to install lines for at least 5 years.
 

NY_Rob

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^ in Brookhaven township, that's the perfect time to rip up the road... while the asphault's still fresh :mad:

That's too bad, our area has had gas since it was built in the early 1960's. We never see oil delivery trucks on our street.... unless they're lost. Many of my neighbors have original cast iron gas fired boilers from 1962 or so when the homes were built. They're obsolete as far as safety features compared to modern mod-cons, but they still run perfectly fine.
 

Dana

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It's highly likely that the house can be heated at much higher efficiency with the oil-fired hot water heater, and still have plenty of burner capacity left over for hot water. This is preferable to a new boiler, since the thermal mass of the hot water in the tank is many times that of the water in the fin-tube, making it inherently short-cycle proof. Unit #6 was in the Brookhaven study was such a system, but done on a somewhat lower efficiency water heater than what you likely have. (You're is probably in the 85-86% steady-state efficiency range.) It would have to isolate the potable from the heating system water with a plate-type heat exchanger, and use a bronze-impeller pump on the potable side, but very little else would have to change in the system.

To figure this out...

How much baseboard there is on each zone?

What is the make & model of the water heater?

What is the burner make & model on the water heater, and it's current nozzle size?
 
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