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On The Level: Old, inefficient boiler needs to be replaced

02.12.11

Your boiler is truly an antique. It might be the age of the house, so you could look up when the house was built to get a feel for its age. As a teenager I briefly had a 1954 DeSoto automobile. It ran like a top. It got six to eight miles to the gallon. I couldn't afford that beast even when gas was 32.9 cents a gallon. Your boiler is in that category. Sure, your boiler works and will heat nicely, but you'd need to buy an oil well to feed it.

I think that the domestic hot water coil that once provided the home's boundless hot water, known as a "summer/winter hook-up," was terminated as you can see, and a stand-alone electric water heater was added to the house so the boiler could be completely shut down in summer. However, boilers likes to maintain a core temperature between 160 to 180 degrees all the time. That's why you hear it cycling on, pumping oil into the burn chamber and hot exhaust up that 8-inch flue pipe to the atmosphere, even when the thermostat is not calling for heat. Another reason your ancient boiler likes to stay in one warm temperature range is repetitious cooling and heating of the metals as the boiler would alternately fire and cool would stress the joints and gaskets to eventual leakage.

Source: Annapolis Capital