Maybe you don’t take the School of the Boat too serious, or maybe you do. But here is a lesson I just learned (again) at home. It’s called always ask the “experts.”
I have a two story very old home. It also has a full basement. I heat 3 floors using a water boiler system. Heated water goes through copper pipes around the baseboards in all three floors. The system is divided into 3 separate zones so I am able to control the temperature on each floor.
Well Sunday night the second floor stopped working. It wasn’t noticeable (by me) when I got up, but the wife sure noticed and did not say anything to me. Her usual method of getting this re-occurring problem to work is to beat (lightly) on the thermostat. Yes, not good practice, but I cannot get her to stop doing that to the thermostat.
As she leaves for work around 1 pm, she finally tells me that there is no heat on the second floor and she was not about to sleep up there without heat. So our oldest, also former Navy – though not a Submariner) and I started to trouble shoot this problem. We started naturally at the beaten thermostat. We went into the basement and started to purge that zone of air. You see the day before we had a water main burst out near us and the township had to shut off all water. OK, we did have air. But the more we bleed this zone, the more air we got, and finally we got NO water. Hum!
So call the neighbor over to see if he can come up with an idea. We then started to bleed the other two zones – air and finally NO water. OK now those two zones had been working.
We took the cover off the thermostat panel and verified that we got a signal from all 3 thermostats. So even the beaten thermostat was working (so stop beating it Wifey).
Now the oldest and the neighbor were trying all sorts of things. The one thing that I could not get the neighbor to keep in mind is that the boiler system also supplies hot water to the house and that was still working. It is on a separate system through the holding tank.
All three zones are feed from common headers – both return and discharge. So being a good Submariner I drew out the three zones with all valves, facets, check valves, and stop valves. I was looking for a way to refill the system since we had pretty much drained it – there had to be a combination that I just could not see. Set up the valves this way or that way – I just did not see a way to refill from the cold water feed from the street.
Finally – we three looked at each other and said it is time to call the expert. While I called, the other two put everything back normal with all thermostats shut off so none of the circulators would be running. The boiler was fine since we still had good hot water.
I got the plumber on the phone – a guy that worked on our system once before. He said, as soon as I describe the original problem, that he knew exactly what was wrong – the cold water make up valve was bad. He came out within 30 minutes, went down stairs and tried one simple test. Yep that is your problem – I’ll be out in the morning and fix it.
But I need heat tonight? What am I to do? He then said go get a washing machine hose and connect it from this facet to this facet (OK you may need pictures). But simple to say that these facets were on the cold water line to the holding tank and the other was at the bottom of the boiler. This will then pressurize the system and everything will be running again.
OK that was so simple – but the two facets just did not figure into my drawing – because I thought the one on the boiler was just to drain it for maintenance.
The water make up valve is a regulating valve that adds small quantities of water to the system and also to maintain the water pressure. It has a small manual lift on it to open the valve manually. All the plumber did was manually open the valve and by touching the discharge side knew the valve was stuck. Since the discharge valve was hot – no cold water entered the system. This is why we had no pressure or water.
So during any school of the boat we all try to become the experts. But the experts really do know more than what is just found in the manuals.
When you are out at your boats it is really important that you trace out each system that you are working on – after all you are the one that is becoming the expert.
Sorry for the long boring story – but a lesson learned – is always a valuable lesson.
