Pretty good answer IMHO - I agreed w/ most of it...mtnmizer said:Trzebs13 said:Well the plumer called and I have a 40 gallon hot water heater on the way. So I plan on putting this up in the attic as my "safty cooler" in case of a power outage. the one thing I'm wondering is what would be the minium size piping that I should run to get a good gravity feed? To get the boiler cooled down. I plan on stripping the heater down to the bare tank. And the other thing is would it make a diffrence if I layed it down or not and of so where should the in and out go? What I'm thinking is that the inlet should be on top and the outlet be on the bottom. Does this sound right?
As an unqualified amateur my answer to your question is that
Partly agreed, I would want to elevate it more, so that the inlet on the tank was higher than the boiler at a minimum. I do agree with the vertical part of it.I'd locate a tank vertically as close to the boiler as possible, elevate it somewhat maybe 2ft
Definitely a good idea on not using PEX, copper would be OK though. There is also a possibility that it might be necessary to put a low resistance flow check valve on the return line in order to prevent "ghost flow" up that line from the boiler return side - might be something you'd need to experiment with to see if it's necessary, and I wouldn't put one in if it wasn't.plumb it with black steel pipe, 1.25". not pex using as few elbows as possible.. hot out from boiler to hot on top of tank return from bottom. Control valve on in line iso valves on both lines.
Tanks in the attic aren't all that bad of an idea, as long as they are adequately protected from freezing, and there is proper support - keep in mind that a 40 gallon tank is probably about 400 lbs...I wouldn't be very comfortable putting a water tank into an attic.
ABSOLUTELY.... Far as I'm concerned part of the test checkout routine on a system should be to get a really good fire going, and then pull the plug on ALL boiler related equipment, and watch the temps and pressures, while being ready to plug things back in if it looks like the "failsafes are failing" - until you can verify by actual test that the power failure system works, I would not want to fully trust the system.And since this is experimental I'd bring up the boiler to max temp and see how it works. MM
Gooserider