Condensate pH and the need for Neutralization

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Jadnashua

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I live in a condo association of townhouses. Our unit drain lines are pvc, but they all drain into a main cast iron line draining the whole building row.

Most units have high efficiency, condensing boilers or furnaces. Given that the pH of condensate tends to be around 4.5, and the things may run their hardest when little to no activity is occuring to flush and dilute that (late night, early morning), how worried should we be about the effect of running all that acid down the lines?

I'm leaning towards mandating the installation of neutralizers in units, but verifying that the media was replaced when necessary would be a tougher call.

Anyone have some actual experience with this issue? I realize, not that many people still have CI piping, and while ours first is dumped into PVC, it accumulates in a main CI run through the whole building.
 

Jadnashua

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Our management company suggests replacing the main line with PVC piping. I'm not too keen on that, and I'm not sure it would be allowed between the multiple units. Our longest PVC run would be just over 200', and from what I can tell based on the basement average seasonal temperatures, the pipe's length would change nearly 3" from coldest to warmest.

I still would like to hear from anyone with experience in large quantities of condensate running into a shared cast iron run - in our longest building, that would probably be in the order of 20-gallons on a cold overnight when little else would be flowing to dilute it through the CI piping at the end, with progressively less as you go towards the other end.

My feeling is keep it cast iron, but add the neutralizers for each unit, the expansion/contraction over the length, and the flow noises in the pipes won't be an issue.

There's a poured concrete wall between each unit that would need to be fire-stopped which would be harder with PVC once you consider the seasonal movement.

One comment was that the CI is brittle while the PVC is a bit more resilient. The runs do go through the garages, too, but my feeling is that if you hit CI hard enough to break it, you'd damage the PVC as well. THoughts on this?
 
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