26 November 2015

Bye-bye boiler, boiler goodbye

I don't know if I've ever before lived in a place that had a boiler — at least, not one that I had to fiddle with. A furnace, yes, but not a boiler. In France, it's called une chaudière (that's the word that we turned into "chowder" in English... but that's a different story). It's a big piece of equipment that heats water. The hot water or steam is then pumped through pipes to heat up wall-mounted radiators installed at strategic points around the house. A boiler and radiators produce a nice steady heat and no drafts. It's a quiet system.

In California, we always had what we called "forced air" heating systems. A furnace heated air which was forced through ducts and out through "registers" (wall vents) in each room of the house. The system was drafty and noisy.

The old Brötje boiler, manufactured and installed in 1992

Anyway, our old boiler is now history. It was a German device of the Brötje brand, and it seemed pretty fancy. It could be programmed to heat the house to different levels for different hours of the day — warmer during daylight hours, and less warm overnight, for example. That feature broke 6 or 7 years ago because of a loose connection in the control panel.

We've been controlling the boiler manually since then. That has meant running up and down the stairs several times a day to turn the thing up or down or on or off. A new control panel for the boiler would have cost about a thousand dollars, so we did without. We didn't think a boiler then approaching the ripe old age of 20 was worth spending so much money on.



Pipes, a pump, and a pressure gauge



In our California house, we had an even better kind of programmable, thermostatically controlled system for our forced air heating. We put the thermostat in ourselves, mounting it on a wall in the place of an older non-programmable thermostat. We had it set for the heat to come on in the morning at around 5 a.m. and warm up the house before we got out of bed.

At night, and in the daytime when we were both out working all day, the temperature was set to go down to just 60ºF or so (about 15ºC). The program turned the heat back up to 68ºF (20ºC) at 6 p.m. so we could enjoy a warm evening back at home. Then it cut the temperature back down to 55 for the nighttime hours.

Below is the programmable control panel for the old Brötje boiler. It was as complicated as it looks.

We actually figured out how to program this thing, before it broke.



We are hoping that we will have similar programming features on this new boiler. The man who sold it too us assures us we will, but we won't know for sure until later today when the installation is complete. At any rate, the one thing we will have that we haven't had since we moved into this house 12 years ago is an actual thermostat. Today, we and our heating plant are leaping feet-first into the 20th century. Imagine!

By the way, you in America might be surprised that our boiler work is being completed on Thanksgiving Day. Well, today is not a holiday in France. Today is just another Thursday like any other.

30 comments:

  1. Boilers are very alien to Australians, and so I have a fascination with such an exotic creature as a boiler. Your old unit seems large compared to those I have seen in England. The one I particularly noted only ran five radiators plus hot water. I'd like to see a photo of the new one.

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    1. I or Walt will publish photos of the new boiler. It's about the same size as the old one (I need to put something in the photo for scale). Our heating system has 12 radiators, and a lot of them are very large. Walt says our building when we lived in Washington DC had a boiler, but it was the landlord who had it serviced and adjusted. All we had to do was turn the thermostat to the setting we wanted.

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  2. Happy Tanks Giving...may your water be warm and your radiators hot!
    Hope all goes well today....

    That "controller" looks like something out of the 70s, rather than the 90s...
    I have yet to learn how to get a "set back" mode set up on ours....
    the manual in both French and English is a couple of pages shorter than the German...
    I think something vital to the process was left out of the translation...
    so we just run it at 20 Centipedes!

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    1. Download the German manual for the boiler and run the text thru Google Translate. Might be a way to find the solution.

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  3. We had ours installed 10 yrs ago when we bought the house. Oil fired and with no thermostats in the living areas it does 7 rads (it will do the hot water only in the summer and if you want when the radiators are on). But it is dependent on electricity so we have a remote switch telecommande that saves us setting a program or bobbing downstairs. The last couple of days have required morning heating as well as afternoon and evening. Best of luck with your new installation. Oh! Happy Thanksgiving to you both.

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    1. The boiler is dependent on electricity as well as fuel oil (or natural gas). Ours is oil, but when there is a panne de courant goes out, we have no heat except the wood-burning stove. That works for us.

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  4. We don't have a boiler in France, just ordinary hot electric water systems that just do our hot water, and a wood stove + a few non-fixed electric radiators for heating. In the UK we had endless trouble with our boiler. It ran of mains gas and could be switched to just water or water and radiators. It never worked properly, even after the plumber discovered eventually that some part or other had been fitted back to front and even after we got a thermostat for it, although those two fixes did improve it. One of its really irritating quirks was that you couldn't run the radiator in the bathroom unless you were also running the hot water, so you couldn't warm the bathroom up before having a bath.

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    1. We have an electric ballon d'eau chaude too, so we only have to use the boiler in wintertime. Ours is oil-fired, but that's a good thing now, because the price of oil is so low (and the U.S. dollar is so high). Our system doesn't have any particular quirks.

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  5. Wishing you a happy and WARM Thanksgiving!

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  6. "Bye, bye boiler". I think I saw that movie in the 60s. Anyway, I'm looking forward to hearing the evolution of the word chowder. And to chime in on heating systems stories, we have the very worst. Electric resistive room units. It's a good thing we have a small house (at least in winter). Bon courage.

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    1. So far so good. I'm not sure what electric resistive units are.

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  7. In my house in New York State, I have a boiler. But no nice old fashioned radiators that steam and make noises that are not bad because you know when you hear them, it will be getting warmer in the room soon. I have "air heat" ... the furnace is fueled by ( very expensive) oil that comes in a truck every so many months and the boiler heats some parts of the house (water/bath) but electricity heats the rest.
    Which is soooo expensive.
    One of the main reasons I am leaving this house and NY State ... heading South :)

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    1. I've been using an electric radiator for heat in our loft room for a couple of days. It's effective, but I'm sure it would cost big bucks long-term. Oil is so cheap right now.

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  8. Stay warm! Happy Thanksgiving

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    1. We haven't had any trouble staying warm, since the weather warmed up just in time for our boiler installation.

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  9. happy thanksgiving! or 'just thursday.' we have forced air and i just hate it. we try and use the wood burning stove as much as possible - which is much better.

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    1. I would enjoy the wood fire much more than the forced-air heat too. We use the wood fire and the radiators -- a good balance.

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  10. Upon opening my eyes this morning, the first thing I thought of was how strange it was to live in France on Thanksgiving and the 4th of July. Just normal days in France.
    I am curious to know more about chowder (feel free to throw in a recipe). I imagine it's something about the shared concept of giving warmth.
    My furnace is forcing air as I type this. :)

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    1. It is usually a little confusing to be here on Thanksgiving and July the Fourth. But today we had enough distractions that we didn't really notice. Are you having turkey?

      More later about chowder. Enjoy the drafty heat!

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    2. Actually, my registers are in the floor. When I lived in San Jose, we had registers at ceiling level. Since it was a ranch house and the registers pumped warm air upwards, I'm sure our attic was plenty warm.

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    3. Did you go to Ginny's for Thanksgiving dinner? Our house in Sunnyvale had heat registers at ceiling level, I believe.

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  11. Well, by now today, it is probably installed. Enjoy!

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    1. It is done. Now we have to learn to live with it. Adjust it. Regulate it. Enjoy it.

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  12. Yes, the controls looks complicated. I agree that radiators are nice for heating though. I hope you enjoy your new system.

    We have radiant heat wires in our ceiling (yep, not the floor) and forced air a/c/ which is quite loud when it operates.

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    1. I never understood the ceiling level heat in California. Often the hot air vents were at ceiling level with the forced air systems we had.

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  13. In Poland bioiler is very popular.

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  14. Your description of the steam boiler sounds like what I had back in the day in a pre-war building in Manhattan. Good heat, but you couldn't control it from the individual apartments, so there was much roasting on warm winter days. The new arrangement sounds much better, and less frazzling, congratulations.
    I've finally learned how to deal with / understand (sort of) heat pumps, but I gather they're not much good if the temp goes below 20 F in the winter.

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  15. Ah, c'est fait maintenant ;-) Our daughter has a thermostat that she can set with her iPhone from work or anywhere. Amazing really.

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  16. Forced air: drafty and noisy, and pretty ineffective too. Basically, we're only warm when the furnace is blowing. I'm envying your new "works" right now.

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