October 31, 2011

A couple of weeks ago, I did my annual pre-heating season ritual of flushing my 42 year-old Weil-McLain steam boiler in preparation for the ceremonial relighting of the pilot light. I learned later from a plumber that you shouldn’t flush a cold boiler because the fresh incoming water will leave chemical deposits. It was academic however because the boiler was drained dry. WTF? The low water cutoff (LWCO) or autofeed should have replenished the boiler with fresh water even with the boiler shut off. It didn’t. The LWCO looks like some sort of WW2-era cartoon bomb device. It hadn’t been […]