Purging Air From A Boiler System (Residential)

there are a lot of good videos out there made by some very talented guys that show you how to purge air out of a boiler plumbing system but there's one drawback that I feel a lot of these videos have for you the viewer when it comes to really understanding it all and that drawback is that they only really kind of show you how to purge the air out of that boiler in that system in the video in this video I'm not going to show you how to purge the air out of some stranger's boiler instead we're going to go over some of the basic Plumbing designs and principles that you will see when you walk up to Annie boiler so that you can identify them you know what those pipes do you know with the valves on those pipes do and you'll understand why that valve needs to be opened or closed when you're purging air out of a boiler's plumbing system I'm Jersey Mike and these are the basic principles and Concepts that professionals understand and use whenever they walk up to any boiler so one of the first things that I've learned the hard way when it comes to purging the air out of a boiler's plumbing system is that I want to take a look at the bleeder valves that are located on radiators and baseboard heaters now in a properly functioning system bleeding the air out of your boiler's plumbing system should not be a routine thing in many cases these little bleeder valves have not been exercised in as many years as the boiler been installed now if you have a boiler it's been in there for 20 or 30 years it's been a while these little bleeders they do get rusty they do get crusty and they do cake over and I have found my share of plenty of them that will not open if you don't do this first and you wait until the very last step which is to come to these bleeders and bleed the air out of those last couple of stubborn radiators or baseboard heaters you're going to find that you may have to replace that bleeder because if even if a radiator has been given off heat for 20 years once air gets in there it's not going to heat up again and so you can bleed the air out of that little port and if you can't open it this means you're going to have to repair it you're gonna have to shut your boiler down you're gonna have to isolate the feed water depressurize the system make the repair and then start from square one all over again purging the whole process so do yourself a favor check those first now this is also an opportune time to check and see what kind of tool you're going to need to open these bleeders up now there's many different types out there but this is the one that I always need it's a small bleeder key it's got a square shaped recess into it and it fits right onto the bleeder and I just turn it to open it up to bleed the air out now you may find you need something different you may not need anything at all but a flathead screwdriver but you wouldn't want to find out because I can pretty much assure you in most cases you may have to bleed one of these radiators out [Music] when it comes to the task of actually figuring out where we can hook our hose up what valves are we going to keep open or closed it's very easy to think of this in the most simplest terms your boiler's plumbing system is just one big circle it is a loop and the water travels out of the boiler goes through all the heaters in your house and has to make its way back to the boiler again it goes over and over around and around millions of times over many years and it just never stops it it's the Eternal Loop now when we're going to purge the air out of a boiler we have to open this Loop up we have to stop it from going around and around and we have to push the air out of this Loop which means we're going to close a valve that creates a beginning and an end it's not Eternal bloop anymore it is now more like a race track with a Finish Line it marks to start and the end of the race now somewhere near this valve you're also going to have an exit point that will be plumbed into your piping and this is your hose hookup so somewhere in your system you're looking for an isolation valve and a hose hookup that's right near it now before we close any valves we're going to want to shut the power off on our boiler because as we're isolating Valves and purging this out we don't want our boiler firing on so you're going to look for a red burner switch emergency shut off switch it's usually a red plated switch and you just shut that off now in many systems that I've come across and systems that I actually install myself this shut off valve and hose connection is usually going to be found on the return side of the boiler a one quick easy way to determine which pipe is your supply piping which one is your return is that after the water gets heated in your house it's given up some of its heat obviously and it has to make its way back to the boiler to get reheated again the best place to introduce this water to heat it up very quickly is near the bottom of the boiler where the burner are so your return line is going to be going into your boiler at a fairly low spot your supply line on the other hand will be exiting the boiler near the higher part of the boiler so sometimes these pipes come directly off the top sometimes they still come off the side but at a higher point so what we're looking for is that lower pipe and entering into the boiler now once we identify this return line we're going to start tracing it from the boiler back and we're going to look for that isolation valve and that exit point which is your hose connection now on many boilers you may find this right away which is right above your circulator pump we're going to shut that valve up and you're going to hook your hose up there now there are some Plumbing setups out there where you might find a circulator pump you might find a shutoff valve above it but you don't see a hose connection right there but you might see one right below the circulator pump this is not the hose hookup we're looking for this is basically to drain the boiler out and and clean the block out if we ever need to what you're looking for is a hose connection that is above that valve somewhere when you're tracing this return line back you may not actually come to just one shut off valve and one hose connection you may come to maybe three or four circulator pumps with shut off Valves and hose connections or you may come to quite a few zone valves also with the shutoff house and hose Connections in a zoned system you cannot Purge the whole thing all at once you have to do each Zone one at a time independently so if you're tracing your return line back and you come to a situation like this you're going to have to close all of those Valves and as we go through the process of purging the air out of this boiler we're going to be moving our hose from one zone to the next to the next to the next until we're done regardless of all these different piping arrangements and systems we're still looking for the same thing all the time we're looking for that isolation valve that breaks the loop the beginning in the end of the loop and we're looking for an exit point just above that isolation valve so it may only be one setup like that you may have multiple setups like that in a zone system but it's all the same thing now the only thing left to say on this is that sometimes you will find a host connection above or below your zone valves if you have a hose connection that's below your zone valves you're going to have to manually open and lock open that zone valve in order for the water to come out if the hose connection is above the zone valve then you don't need to do that the entire purpose of purging air out of a boiler is to create a pressure differential in the system when we open up that ball valve that our hose is connected to what we're doing is we're opening up this system to the atmosphere now somewhere in this Loop near the boiler you're going to find a feed water line this is usually a half inch diameter copper line with a pressure regulator and a check valve on it this is your city water this is the same water that comes out of your TAP at your sink or your bathtub it's the the job of this feed water regulator is to constantly keep your boiler's plumbing system under pressure when you open up that valve and create that pressure differential you're dropping the pressure in the system and this pressure regulator is going to open up and continue to feed water into your boiler and this is how we use pressure in a system to push water through the entire Loop and out our hose and this is how we carry the air out of the system now now as all this water is coming out of your hose the pressure regulator will constantly feed fresh water in and so this is not water that's going to be actually staying in your boiler's plumbing system it is a flush we're going to be running it through the whole system and right out the hose what this means is that you're going to need to find a place to run your hose where you can dump a lot of water now it could be a floor drain a sump pump a slop sink a toilet nearby or you could just run it outside now at this point we're ready to actually begin our perch we have our power off on our boiler we have our shut off valves closed and we have our hose hooked up to the hose connection now all we need to do is open up the valve on the hose and let water start running out now you may hear a lot of commotion right away this is all the air in the lines and the water rushing through and you're going to be able to hear this what we're looking for is we're looking for that to start quieting down at the other end of your hose you're going to hear a lot of spitting and sputtering this is the air coming out of your hose so what we're looking for here is we're looking for the water coming out of the hose to be nice and clean water nice steady stream no spitting no spurting no air bubbles it's all nice clean steady stream of water now a couple little tricks I'm going to share with you guys that we do whenever we're purging these boilers out at this point one little trick I do is I actually hold on to the hose when I'm standing near the boiler and you can actually feel in the palm of your hand the vibrations of the air bubbles going through the hose another thing I do is I listen as the air starts to come out of your system and becomes less and less you will notice that the water running through the pipes will start to get quieter and quieter now here's another trick I'm going to share with you this is what is called a forced Purge now what you're going to do is you're going to look on your boiler somewhere and there's going to be a pressure gauge there that that should be reading somewhere in the ballpark of 10 psi you want to keep an eye on that gauge when you do this you reach over to your water pressure regulator and you're there should be a little valve on top of that what you're going to do is you're going to lift that valve up a little bit or you can sometimes you can actually lift it all the way now you want to keep an eye on your water pressure when you do this because as you lift that valve up the pressure in your system is going to increase so you want to make sure you keep that pressure below 30 PSI because on the back of your boiler somewhere there is a pressure relief valve and this is set at 30 PSI and when it pops it pops there's going to be a lot of water coming out of that relief valve and it takes a minute or two for it to reset so it takes a while for that thing to close back up again so you want to make sure when you do this and you lift that valve up you want to keep it below 30 PSI in fact I usually tell guys you want to probably keep it going out below 25 maybe even down closer to 20 because a lot of times these pressure valves these uh these gauges they don't read accurately I have been caught a few times pushing in at around 25 psi and the pressure regulator pops now the reason why we're doing this is because with an increase in pressure we have better odds of pushing air out of the system and if you're lucky enough this might be just enough to push enough air out of your system that you might not have to bleed at the radiators or if you do it might only need to be one or two rather than a whole bunch of them now once you feel like you've gotten all the air out of the system you want to make sure if you're using that pressure valve for a force Purge you want to let that off you want to let it go back down to it's about 10 psi pressure regulation point and then you want to close the valve that your hose is connected up to what you're going to hear is you're going to hear water still rushing into the system but it will slow down and it'll start to quiet down and eventually it will stop if it doesn't stop something's still open now even at this point if you're using zone valves you can go ahead and close that zone valve that you were flushing through and now you just disconnect your hose and you move on to the next one and you start start the process all over again now one thing to keep note of here you have to pay attention to this is that sometimes I will see a Zone where the copper comes off of that zone valve and it actually splits off into two different Loops so even though it's two different Loops going to the house it's still controlled by the same zone valve in this case you're going to have to bleed out each one of those Loops individually you can't do them both at the same time you still have air in that system so there should be shut off valves there where you can shut one off open the other one flush it out and then switch them around and Purge the other loop out independently once you're done and you've gotten all the air out of your system and you're finally finished what we could do is we can we make sure our hose connection is closed we make sure all our zone valves are back in the off position we can then go ahead and reopen all of our isolation valves or the one valve that we used and now we're ready to fire the boiler up at this point we need to get the boiler fired up and we need to get the water High when water heats up it expands and when it expands it will help push out any little bits of air that might still be left in the system and this is when we go to the radiators we test them out we make sure they're getting hot and any radiators or baseboard heaters that are not getting hot will have to be bled out so my goal with this video was not to make the one and only video you'll ever need on the internet to learn how to purge air out of boiler's plumbing system my goal with this video was to help you understand what these guys are doing when you're watching it the supplement to them it is to for you to be able to watch these other videos watch this video understand what those guys are doing from this perspective and so if your boiler or the boiler you walk up to isn't exactly the same as the one you've seen in the video at least now you have the fundamentals of understanding what they're doing once again I'm Jersey Mike please subscribe and let me know how I'm doing out there

Channel: Jersey Mike HVAC

Views: 17,893

Keywords: purging air from a boiler system, how to purge air out of boiler plumbing system, How to purge air out of a boiler system, how to purge air from a boiler system, how to purge air from a boiler piping system, purging air form a boiler system, purging air from a boiler sytem, purging air fomr a boiler system, purging air from boiler, purge air from boiler heating system, purging air from hot water heating system, purging air form boiler, how to bleed boiler, how to bleed a boiler

Id: F4OdgpqKkzw

Length: 14min 34sec (874 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 27 2022