Poorly maintained (and currently leaking) oil boiler?

@stevecym, a modern heatpump can meet the heat load without eletric strip backup, but the system must be sized correctly to meet the heating load on cold days.

Seems like just the return line, just replace it or have a temporary repair patch put on. The return lines usually just sit on the cellar floor and are prone to rust out.

When the weather is warmer and its not an emergency have a professional like Master Plumber come out to assess your system and give you a quote on service or replacement.

Hey Steve, love the ’95 Volvo! I have an ’86 740 Turbo intercooler wagon in the “collection” upstate, this is now the 7th Volvo I’ve had over the years. All DIY on the mechanicals, they’re super simple. The car is fast, but just got a set of matched reman. Bosch injectors and a set of wires and Denso plugs from Ipd, can’t wait to put them on (when the weathers warmer) and see how it improves.
Still keeping an eye out for a T5-R and a 140 series though!

Its the fracking they hate, rightfully so. I want this oil tank out of this place. I am lucky that my wife came from a country where in the 1960s when the house she grew up in was built, central heating was not the norm. And if i put the heat on too high here, everyone gets annoyed. You get used to it on the cool side. We spend nothing on heat.

I am wondering something. The heat pumps i used 25 years ago had an electric coil that came on when the temp dropped below a certain point. I cannot recall if i could manually kick that coil on to force the heat a bit. How are these new systems? Do they have an electric coil and can you heat a place fast by turning it on?

That’s true steve. I often enjoy a wood fire in the winter as well, which I think is a little more enjoyable to huddle around than a steam radiator, which is what I had growing up. However, is it worth it burning all that oil for? That’s up to the OP I guess. Like I said, just putting another idea out there. I think natural gas is going to be on the decline in the city. The plumbing regulations are brutal, the pipelines have been blocked, and the state doesn’t seem to be encouraging gas use.

Urban, i keep watching the conversations about mini splits just to learn about the pricing. I also read what jjq said about heat pumps heating differently and i recall being cold often when i lived in places that had heat pumps, during college. I think the heat these radiators give off is fast and more comfortable – you know its working on a cold day. Especially for peope like us, we enjoy a cold house at night and shut the heat off entirely.

If you’re on oil and steam, you could consider putting your money towards a minisplit heat/cool sytem, then just retire the boiler and radiators. I can see some arguments against, but it sounds like you’re not happy with any of your current options, so there’s another.

OP, i can parse a couple of things out from Master Plumbers reply and will, because what he is saying applies to me as well. first, I want to point out something about how he communicates: he questions what others say about something and will knock it when it is wrong in his understanding of things – often using words like “absurd” without really educating us, telling us what we can look for with our boilers to make a judgement about them – before they begin leaking ( and when he is wrong about something, he keeps questioning what someone is saying probably to divert the attention away from him and toward the person challenging him; i suspect he does it because he’s realized it has the effect of silencing people who challenge him; what he does not realize is – it might also drive people away and most of us in business don’t need that). Because of this way of communicating, i was careful to mention that someone in the industry – someone much older than i and much older than master plumber, someone who’d spent his life working for commercial boiler company (and mi ght very well be dead now) – told me that “when the sections leaked, it was time to shop. ” i am not qualified to make a statement like that and cannot debate it with the man who said it nor can i with master plumber. in truth i think MP knows his stuff and I would not mind watching those two men debate that statement. (in the case of that old boiler, the system had all sorts of issues but the leaks in the system did not keep it from making heat, it just had to fire more often than it should and ended up costing more money to run than it should have).

master plumber rightly questions what the people who sell the oil might say about the boiler and in my earlier reply I questioned using them because they might be making money off the repair. if they are driven only by money, then they could very well be sending the cheapest inexperienced help in just to keep nursing these old systems along – keep something in mind with homes; you get what you pay for. I had a service contract with an oil company and had them clean my boiler every year and once in a while i got an older guy who did things a little different, maybe more thorough, and spent more time (and shared a lot more knowledge) than the younger guys did and one of the younger guys, basically a “kid”, once cleaned the boiler by taking the flue off and pouring a five gallon bucket of water over the sections, leaving water to run over the floor. I had never seen anyone do something like that before and when i did, i dropped the contract and bought the brushes and began cleaning it myself (as i write this i wonder if master plumber will come on here and tell me dumping water over the sections is acceptable – i doubt it). back to something else master plumber said “what makes anyone think there 30 year old boiler is good? is it what the people who sell you the oil say?” I asked one of the guys the oil company sent about the condition of my boiler and he said the same thing that the other man had said about the sections not leaking. after reading what master plumber said, calling some of this thinking into question, i think we have to consider the biases of the maintenance people – especially since some of them may realize that some like us might want to switch to gas (my guess is the gas requires less maintenance). (i want gas because i want the oil tank out of my basement).

if i had just bought a home with an older system, i would say it would be wise to have someone experienced look at it, maybe even an installer, just to hear what they have to say. even if you had to pay them for their opinion, telling them up front that you are not necessarily boiler shopping. if someone who does primarily installs says the system is good, that will say a lot. you can pose the same questions about the system to the service contract people (you will need one of the experienced guys, not some “kid”); my guess is the truth about your system will lie somewhere between what each of them say.

Doors…. You didn’t say anything I feel is blatantly incorrect. But I will say this: I didn’t read the study you reference but there is a very real safety factor to consider when deciding that keeping a 30-year-old boiler running is an “economical” decision. As boilers age, they burn less well, which raises carbon monoxide levels, and they absorb less heat from their flame, which of course lowers efficiency. I hear it all the time from people, “This thing is old but it runs GREAT!” And all that runs through my head is “How would you even know?” What are a person’s criteria for thinking this is a true statement? Is it because the company who sells you fuel said so? Being able to turn on without causing a fire or shooting water into your cellar should not be the benchmark of a boiler’s health. In many parts of (western) Europe, boilers are inspected EVERY YEAR for carbon monoxide gas levels and efficiency and they are locked off if they fail either inspection until they can be repaired or replaced. Few boilers last more than 10 years in these homes. The statement “when the sections begin leaking, start shopping” is dangerously absurd. I had two separate clients whose Brooklyn homes went without heat the past two nights in this snowstorm because their boilers’ sections started leaking on Sunday. Loss of containment means no heat, period.
So, that all aside, I agree and confirm that a leak on a steam return line does not necessarily constitute an imminent boiler replacement or other such emergency. It might just be a leak that you fix and get on with your life.

and you know what else, you might not want to use the plumber the boiler maintenance people send. you don’t know what you are getting and the maintenance company probably makes money off of it and might send someone cheap, to that end. go with someone these people on here recommend or consult master plumber. even if just for an hour to learn about the system and potential problems. when i took the job with the old boiler i mention above, i had no experience with a boiler so we paid the boiler company to send someone out and run over it with me.

i don’t know where everyone else is on this and i am surprised master plumber has not piped in and found three things wrong with what i said. i suppose they are all making snowmen or snow ladies.

can i give you an analogy i just thought of? a true one. this happen last summer and i was not happy. my wife has a 1995 volvo. the car has two mufflers (or a muffler and a resonator for those trying to visualize this, no it is not the catalytic convertor). it has a good engine and is otherwise immaculate. one of the mufflers went bad. i took it to a garage and they gave me a pretty good price to change the bad muffler, the one in the very back of the car and install a piece of pipe. it sounded fair so i said do it. two months later, the car is making noise like the muffler is bad. so i crawl under and look; the second muffler, closer to the front of the car had gone bad. really? were these people who replaced the other one not competent enough to inspect the rest of the exhaust system and tell me something else might go bad in 4 months and roll all the pieces in one price that while costing more would not be as painful as doing it over two or three visits over a year like going to the dentist for 3 different fillings? when i spoke to them about it, they said “we were trying to save you money and had no idea” (and this was a national chain) my thought was “i am self employed and don’t have the time to jockey cars around to garages and that muffler probably had indications of pending failure” and “i should have crawled under there and done this myself”.

this is what can happen with contractors and i have been there (when i was less experienced): they do not have the guts to tell a customer what really NEEDS to be done and how MUCH it will cost. find someone is who is really good and busy. if they are busy and do not need the work, they can afford to tell you the truth; the truth usually is, it is going to cost more. the truth is, if you are having leaks around the boiler but the boiler is fine, maybe it is time to skip the $500 repairs and spend $1000 and do a complete run the length of the basement. it might have to be done in six months anyway.

we went through this in a building i used to work in (the one i mention in my reply above with the 1955 boiler). the pipes that tended to go bad were the horizontal ones and the steam condensate had literally cut a 1/16″ plus channel in the bottom of them, over 45 years. when i had them repaired, I directed them to cut out complete sections of pipe and change them. we did not just cut out the part that was leaking and and say 8′ side to side. we went as far as we could go, including any neighboring sections in that room because that one would be next. of course it was not my money.

there is a guy that comes on here called Master Plumber. He knows all about these systems and he is an up and up tradesperson that charges a proper price to do a proper job and i had crossed paths with his help on jobs and they were all experience pros. no low balling and sending in unqualified people and no bottom feeding. someone said that he acutally no longer does hands on but consulting only and his family run the other side of the business. he will tell you the truth no matter how much it hurts. there are others on here who can speak to this as well.

my opinion? master plumber may comment to some of what i am going to say and he may bluntly tell me i am wrong, but i will stick my neck out anyway. I would not consider a return pipe part of the boiler. it is part of the heating system and depending on where it is leaking, 20′ feet from the boiler perhaps, maybe no one updated that section of pipe when they did the boiler 18 years ago. someone like MP will know right away if that pipe is older than the boiler. also, in my house, with our 30 year old boiler, we don’t have leaks in the boiler but in the pipes, including the return and in once case a riser (not part of the boiler and i plug weld the pipes when it happens). we as lay people really do not know if a bolier has been properly maintained or not (unless you know the history or a pro told you this). i took care of an OLD boiler (1955 and that was in the late 1990’s) in a building once and some of the connections to the mud drums were leaking and other than having those fixed, the boiler company told me “as long as the sections don’t leak, keep running it. when the sections begin leaking, start shopping”.

i am going to run my now 30 plus year old boiler as long as i can. why? ten years ago, i was trying to decide what is more economical to change it to something that might be more efficient or wait. we have had not problems with it, save some issues with the burner itself – but those are typical maintenance issues. i was thinking of the cost of fuel oil. then i found this great article on line explaining the economics of running an old boiler. the conclusion was, after tallying all the costs, it is cheaper to run an old boiler that has been paid for than buy a new one. the last line said, “you want to keep it as long as possible provided it does not fail on a cold january day”. the best thing about this article, and this is no lie, after i finished reading it i looked at who wrote it, to check his or her credentials; my cousin, a researcher at the Department of Energy.

I suppose keeping an old boiler is only efficient if the pipes that are failing are not ones that would be changed with the boiler, if you went that route.

i am waiting for my lumps from master plumber. i already know he will ding me for saying i plug weld the pipes.