I recently converted from oil to gas heat in a 4 zone home-- 2 with baseboard and 2 with cast iron radiators. A new cast iron Burnham boiler was installed to take the place of an old steel boiler.

My prolems is with the radiators-- where I have lost heat seven times in one month. Apparently air gets trapped in the raditors. The installer arrives to drain the system of the trapped air and it works again for a few day or even as long as a week only to occur again. I have bled the radiators so that's not the problem. I now know how to remove the trapped air from the boiler by draining the bolier zone but don't want to have to do that on a regular basis.

The installer is good about coming back and he sympathizes with me but I need answers and not stop gap measures. He will be returning this week with a boiler rep to analyze the problem. I would like to be prepared with my own suggestions.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Rponzman...

You should have an automatic fill valve and a backflow preventor installed on the water feed into the boiler... yes?

If you have purged the air from each zone so that a 5 gallon bucket full of water shows NO BUBBLES when you run the water from each zone into it... then may be that you have an issue with the fill valve not filling the boiler with water to proper PSI (12-15 PSI optimal)..? Just a thought..?

Try the 5 gallon bucket test for all zones... ;)

Here, isolate each zone and purge the mains of water until you no longer see bubbles float from a full bucket of water. Then after that, and it can take awhile to remove air from the main runs, only then do you purge air from the radiators.

Otherwise, rep. is coming out and they should be able to pinpoint this dead on for you.

Either way, please let us know what the rep. tells you... ok? This one sounds curious?

Thank you...

MARK

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Rponzman...

Thank you for positive rating! Please let us know what happens here... ok?

MARK