HX not going well

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sixroses

Member
Hearth Supporter
Jan 31, 2008
70
alaska
I hate power outages!! They have been my challenge all year. Today I have a HX issue. I have 180* water going in and 80* water coming out, but my gas boiler and zones are not getting the heat. Seems like a flow problem, which causes real problems back at the GW. I have a 007 pushing water through the stove, a second 007 pushing from stove to HX (60 feet and down hill) a 3rd 007 after the HX pushing through a 36" side arm back to the stove (uphill about 6 feet) I have 1" pex and copper with 1, 3/4 zone valve which probablly restricts water flow. Thing is it worked great all winter up untill we had a power outage a couple of days ago. Several big events in the garage since then!
Please shoot back some ideas..
Thanks, Steve
 
Sounds like an air lock issue. Do you have shut off valves and purge cocks to "burp" out the air? or any automatic air purgers?

Could you have a section that froze?

To move energy you need a temperature difference, and flow.

hr
 
When I installed my system a few years ago I started with a single 007 pump and had a terrible time getting all the air out of my system. A Taco 007 pump consumes about 75 watts of power and didn't have the guts to move the air out of my system. I switched to a Taco 009 and had a great improvement in bleeding air out. Where do you remove air from your system? IF YOU ARE VERY CAREFUL you can loosen your pump flanges and if air is present it will hiss as it leaks out. I hope you put isolation valves at all your pumps. You might want to remove and bench test the pumps, It doesn't take much to lock up a circulator pump. Seems like a boiler in Alaska without backup power would be dangerous. Good luck.
 
Are all you're pumps running? Sometimes they are so quiet you can't tell. Did you melt the impeller in one of them? They are just plastic! The low temp coming out doesn't mean anything, HX works better with low flow.

Ken
 
How hot did your water get when the power was off? You may have a fried circ somewhere. Also possible that one didn't start back up when the power returned.
 
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