How to remove the air from your boiler / heater

hey everybody i'm dominic from aspectdiy.com in this video i'm going to show you how to how to remove the air out of your boiler and when you have the hot water baseboard heat you have the water running through and you get the air and it's making a lot of noise banging or you did some kind of work and you need to remove the air i'm going to show you just how to do that on this system now keep in mind uh plumbers can plummet differently and different systems but basically they're all the same okay first thing you need to know especially when you have banging in the system which can be a result of you don't have enough water in there it can also be though you have an expansion tank now like anything when you heat it it expands now like the water in your system well when it heats up it's going to expand well where's it going to go can't go anywhere you don't want to break a pipe so we have an expansion tank and basically what this is it's half air half water it has a rubber bladder in the middle of it there if you tap on it you can hear the difference okay up on top you should hear more of a thug that's the water in there not much but you have it in there now down lower you have it's just empty air space so it's a bladder in there so when the water expands it pushes it down instead of blowing out a pipe and making all kinds of rackety noises okay so make sure that you do hear that they're not that expensive they're very easy to replace basically on this one spin it off spin a new one on okay alright now one more thing you need to know a boiler means water a furnace is hot air okay so make sure you understand that well you always need water coming into it however your city or well water you can have 60 pounds of pressure if not more while you're boiling the heat going through the house you don't want that much pressure okay so you have thing that's called the regulator which is back here so i'll get a better shot for it for you if you understand it that regulates the pressure down to say about 12 10 to 12 pounds something along those lines on the regulator will tell you a little tag on there normally tell you what it's rated for and you have the water coming in which would also be on that side as well and make sure that water valve is always on because you need a constant water supply to the boiler that once it needs some that regulator valve it just just lets a little in at a time okay but here this is important again this is my system that i built like 13 years ago we have a little purge valve up here now this one is a little plastic screw and you know we just leave it a little loose you know you don't want to tighten that down um most systems have a cap that you would find on your your tire of your air to put air in your tire a little cap that looks very similar to that but it has a little hole on the side a lot of people they see that's loose when having problems oh that's the problem they tighten it down well you just made more problems for yourself believe it or not that's supposed to be loose just a cap on there it has a little schrader valve inside but if any air comes into the system with this purge here it lets the air out by itself a little at a time but when you have a lot of air like if you i don't know had a broken pipe and you fixed that but now what do i do well that's i'm going to show you how to remove that kind of air a lot of air okay well on my system here i have five zone valves and i'm using zone valves and yours may not have that yours may have a circulator pump for each one in this case i only have one pump which will pump the water constantly around as a zone valve opens up it needs it if you have a zone valve i mean you have a thermostat i mean per zone valve in this case it's a pretty big house so five zones five thermostats works pretty good i also have a spigot i only have one spec i don't have any nowhere else on the zones or anything uh you may have one per zone which is great because then you can just bleed that one by itself i like to use the one spigot this way i'm pretty much doing them all at the same time but i'm only doing them if i open up the zone valve like in the summertime you have your water hose outside go water your grass wash your car whatever and the hose is empty and you turn that on and the water spits out and then finally you get a nice flow that's the same exact thing that we're doing here um fortunately i don't have any air in his system so uh we're not going to see any air come out at least i hope not for my sake but we'll give you a whole idea of how it's done okay so one thing you do need it's always i mean at least nice to have keep things a little clean a hose i have a simple hose off a washing machine so if you don't have a you know you don't want to use a 50-foot hose i mean you're just not going to get the results that you want yeah we remove it but when are you gonna know about it okay we're gonna connect one end of this hose onto our spigot here and the other end we're gonna put into a five gallon bucket i mean if you're fortunate that enough to have a drain hole a drain line right can you buy right next to your boiler okay but i like to use a bucket because the bucket fills up with water i'll see any air in the system by the bubbling coming up through the water it works out pretty good okay so again i got the hose onto my one spigot or you can have multiple you have to do each time per zone okay but let me open this up and we'll show you okay i got my hose on in the bucket now the boiler is on i don't know if this microphone i have if you can actually hear it but it's on it's working and that's what i want i want at least the electricity working for the zone valves and the zone valve is open now if you have this kind of zone valve which a lot of houses do you have a little lever on the side of it you can actually move that over manually to open up that zone valve but it's important to make sure you turn that off otherwise well you're going to have a hot room i also have this valve that when i install this it shuts the whole system down but however the water is coming in on this side not the return side where my zone valves are but the supply side so i can actually turn this whole big valve off which turns this whole branch dead so any air is going to not go through the boiler but it's going to come right out the way i designed it for it to come out i mean i've spoken to many different plumbers and they all have a different thought on how to remove the air efficiently well pretty big house it gets done pretty quick works for me and all the other ones i've done all right so for right now i'm going to leave this on because it is it's heating my house i don't want to turn it off again i'm just going to turn this on and i'll give you a close-up exactly what's going to happen and turn that valve on and see what we got okay and i have i have a steady flow of water coming out you can see the steam obviously it's it's hot okay but i don't have any air in the system and i pretty much know that so i'm just going to turn it back off uh for the sake for the sake of it you're going to want to point out to to you're on all boilers you're going to have a gauge not a single round one usually and we have two different gauges on it the one in red so let me give you a better shot of that the one in red in my case is on the bottom this is showing me the temperature of the boiler right now now this would go up to the maximum set and down to the lowest that your control pack your control box is set at this is important one the one right here usually in blue now if you look at it almost looks like it's down to nothing but in fact it's not it's it's right about 15 pounds of pressure let's see i don't know if i can get that good of a shot in here for you yeah you can just about see that yeah it's about 15 pounds of pressure in there well that's important that is the pressure in the pipes themselves and you know for the water pressure that's important that you take a look at that first really before you get involved and going crazy because that's important you have other um you know it's just easier for me to tell you call somebody that knows um like i said this is not my fourth well i hope you understand a little bit better and maybe you can take the air out of your system one thing to remember when you when you turn that spigot on and if you don't get any air out right away well don't be discouraged that has to run through that whole that whatever zone that is has to run through your whole entire house until that air comes out it might be right away even even if it is right away let it run for a while let it run for a while and also do a little at a time if you just open the whole thing up well your boiler normally can't fill up as fast as you're taking it out so you don't want to do that so you know maybe like 30 seconds at a time or i mean there are other ways to work around it but i don't want to get you in trouble okay so anyway i'm dominic from askmediy.com thanks for watching you

Channel: askmediy

Views: 1,552,565

Keywords: remove air, heating system, boiler, heating

Id: wG-CqFr6FLM

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 12 2010