Remove Air from your Boiler and Heating System | How To

how's it going guys in today's video I'm gonna walk you through the steps on how you bleed air out of your hot water heating systems a real easy process shouldn't take you very long you could save a few bucks without having a cold plumber so this is the boiler in my house I've been hearing air in the baseboards and in the pipes for about the past week or so which tells me that I have to lead that air out now this is going to be a similar process for most of the boilers out there you're just going to have to determine how you're gonna go about doing it so on my system here I have three zones and you could tell it on my specific system from the fact that I have three circulator pumps now sometimes systems are set up with one circulator pump and then they add something to the system called a zone valve I do not have that here but it's very possible that yours is set up that way best thing I could tell you is look for valves on the piping coming out of your boiler now you can see over here these are the valves are gonna be looking for these are the individual zones or heating zones in the house on my system so as I told you before I have three heating zones I have one in the basement I have one on the first floor and one on the second floor now this is called an air purge station it's essentially just a valve similar to the valves outside your house that you hook a hose up to and I have one here there's another one up here and then if you come over here here's another one okay that's where we're gonna be hooking up a hose and essentially draining water out of the system which also takes the air out of the system as well okay the first step with this process on any system is to shut the boiler off doesn't matter if you have gas or oil find your service switch shut it off you do not want the boiler running during this process okay you're gonna take your hose and you're gonna pick a zone to start so I'm gonna work front to back here and I'm gonna go ahead and hook the hose up you want to make sure this is nice and tight now I have this hose running over to the bathroom that I have in my basement what you're going to do next is there's going to be another set of valves hopefully on your system and what these valves do is they stop the water flow from the zone back into the boiler so that's this valve this valve and this valve they might not be what valves like this they might be a valve like this in any case you're gonna want to shut those off you're gonna want to shut all three of them off in my case here if you have two zones you'd shut two off if you have one zone you shut one off gotta look again what you have and figure it out so the reason we shut these valves off during the purging process is because we want to push all the air out of the system and not allow it to circulate back into the system once it's out so to show you how this works this is called a fill valve sometimes it's called a make up water valve what this does is injects regular domestic water either if you have it from the city or if you have a well it adds water into the system as the water evaporates now it does evaporate even though it's a closed system you will lose water over time which is why this will inject water back in it maintains a certain pressure in the system usually around 12 psi all right so that water again my system gets injected after the circulator pumps goes through the boiler and then it comes back out the supply goes through all the baseboards the radiators in the house once it's done comes back down this pipe here and because we now have this valve off it can no longer return to the boiler the water is going to be forced out of this valve here we have the hose hooked up so the idea is as you're pushing all the water through the system it's going to carry all the air that's trapped inside the system out the hose and drain it another thing I recommend you do is once you figure out what all these pipes are get yourself a label maker if you don't have that just get a sharpie marker and just label all the pipes so you know what they are for the future okay so once we have that done all of our valves are off for our zones we could start bleeding the system we're gonna go ahead and open this valve up now once you open this obviously water is going to start coming out of the system you hear that noise that is the fill valve starting to add water into the system because it's noticed the pressure drop we have a pressure drop now because we are draining water out the hose you're now going to turn your attention over to that fill valve or make up water valve and on my particular one you can see this handle coming off here and it's labeled fast film what this basically does is once we bring this and pull it down a little bit and move it over it introduces full city pressure into your system the reason why we want to open that up is we want to introduce more pressure to help push the air out of the system all right guys we here at the other end now in the bathroom and this is obviously the end of the hose and I have that in a five-gallon bucket that is currently filling up now the reason why I have it in a bucket is because the bucket and once it gets full KOMO obviously into the shower drain but the bucket allows us to see the air coming up out of the system a lot of times if you just have the hose laying let's say I get drain like this you can't see the air coming out so you don't know what to stop now very noticeable in the beginning if you have a lot of air trapped these two things the end of this hose I move around see the waters start and stop there will be security has me to the end of the hose another ones you have just a little bit air trapped in a system us can be difficult to save by having the hose in the bucket you can see the air bubbles right see right here see the bubbles come up now that'll be a lot more evident when there's bigger of hot air trapped in the system don't pay any mind to the color of the water it's perfectly normal for the water just coming out of the system which is rust taller to it eventually as you're introducing fresh water of the system the water will start to clear up and you'll also be able to see those air bubbles traveling through the bucket as well so there is no set rule on how long you have to purge each zone that's pretty much going to depend on how big the system is how much air you have trapped in the system the piping layout on the system you're just gonna be looking at that bucket that I just showed you to see when the air bubbles stop traveling up through the bucket when they exit the hose you're also gonna want to have an adjustable wrench handy the reason why you need this is you can see here we have some water leaking out of the valve and this is perfectly normal this thing under the valve handle right here is called a packing nut and since these valves aren't used very often when they're opened up sometimes the packing nut is loose and you'll have water leaking out so you can see you got a slow drip here when we're done purging the zone we're gonna go ahead and we can tighten the packing that up it's an easy thing to do and that should stop your leak while we're waiting for this first zone to purge sometimes you'll notice after you open one of these valves and take the hose off that you'll develop a drip out of the outlet here where the hose is usually hooked up even if the valve is shut fully off and that could just be a bad valve what you're gonna need to get is a brass cap they sell those and home depot or lowes and what you do is you'll just screw that on there and I'll stop the water from flowing out that they're in the process of doing this also you're gonna want to go to this valve here that we shut off and just open it for a second or two and then close it back up and the reason why we do that is because we can get some air trapped in this short leg of piping here between this valve and this valve and we want to get that out by opening this valve or shoot it back through the boiler and hopefully when it comes back around again it'll legs it out this valve here through the hose so you want to do that a couple times during this process just to help it out hey guys I just check the other end of this here we're looking pretty good I don't see any more air coming out so what we're gonna go ahead and do is shut this valve off now before you shut this valve you want to go back down to your fill valve and return that to the normal position I can't tell you enough how important that is I'm gonna get into that in a second but once you have that thing returned to its normal position you can go ahead and shut this valve off all right we're gonna move over to our next own now now be careful because this hose is probably gonna be filled with water still it might leak out this end here depending on where you are on your house that might not be a good thing I'm in an unfinished part in my basement now so it's not a big deal but we're gonna go ahead and just screw this guy on to our next own now nice and tight so we're gonna go ahead and open this valve up now and you can see here this packing nut is leaking a lot more than the other one was so we'll tighten that up now but we're gonna go ahead and put our fill valve back to you fully open also tighten this packing that while we're here so small little turn it up packing nut and then weeks tops so it's mentioning with the fill valve why you want to put that back too long the position before you turn the purge station valve off the reason you all you want to do that is because again this is maintaining about 12 psi in your system there's another valve on the system back here this is called a pressure relief valve and what that basically does is it prevents a high-pressure condition inside your boiler and the way that works is these are usually around 30 psi if the boiler reaches 30 psi that valve will open up pop off and it basically dumps water right here on the floor that's purposely set up like that to not go into a drain and basically flood the area where the boiler is so you know there is an and that needs immediate attention you under no circumstances want that valve to pop off the reason for that is once that valve opens up it'll never receipt correctly again and you'll always have a leak out of that pipe there and you're gonna have to replace that valve obviously something we don't want to do here so we want to make sure that we return this back down to the normal operating pressure before we shut that valve off it's not gonna happen instantly where it's gonna raise up to 30 psi but it's an easy thing to forget and you're not gonna know you forgot until you start having a flood on your floor wherever your boiler might be another good thing we could do while we're waiting for the next zone to purge is to check our expansion tank now the way an expansion tank works is there is a rubber bladder inside this thing half this tank is charged with air usually 12 psi that's to match the fill valve again our fill valve is also 12 psi and the top of this has water in it from the heating system and what this does is it'll compensate for different pressure changes in your system so as you heat water it expands the water expands into this tank and presses down onto the bladder in here compressing the air you want to make sure that the bottom of this has air in it that you just hear that change in pitch when I'm banging on it viajero it gets some hollow the solid that's indicating that this tank is still good it should sound hollow down with the areas which it sounds solid up top where the water is now if that depends on how this thing is mounted I have the inlet for this on top which is normally how these things should be connected sometimes installers will put this thing backwards and the pipe will come in the bottom so in that case you're gonna be looking for the hollow noise on the top if the pipe is coming in the bottom of it so that's good in our case here we don't have to worry about that this water is coming up free good now this they're running for about five minutes see any air coming up you can check this a little bit easier but pulling the hose up and something you guys cameras what I can see the end of the hold is pretty good here and I don't see any air coming out of that now which is telling me we have a pretty good flow with no way air in it so we can go ahead and shut this is going off just like before we're gonna go ahead and put this back to its normal position come up here we're gonna shut this valve off take a hose off and move to our last zone blast zone is back here so go ahead get this nice and tight on here we'll go ahead and open this valve again I'll put our fill valve up fully now let's see what we've got [Music] all right guys use a lot of they are coming out right now you can see over here hopefully fill the air bubbles yeah dirty the water God now that's showing me that we probably got a large pocket in air out of the system just now it was trapped somewhere in the piping so it's been running now for about 15 minutes we're gonna return our fill valve back to its normal position and we'll shut this valve off on a side note you should hear this valve not making any noise shortly after turning this valve off because it shouldn't be needing to put any more water in the system at that point so I see are packing that on this leak in a little bit so again we're gonna go ahead and tighten this guy up a little bit it doesn't take much and that stopped this packing that's leaking a little bit also so we'll give that a little bit of a turn next we're gonna go ahead and turn on each individual valve for our zones this will allow the water to flow back through the boiler again once the circulator pumps run good little trick with valves if you're not aware of this is when you turn them fully on see this can't go any more now you turn it back just a hair you never want them fully on to the point where the tight it just prolongs the life of the valve when you do it this way and it also helps prevent the valve from getting stuck in the open position so that's it guys after you get done with that at this point we can go ahead and turn the boiler back on now this is a cold start boiler so if I don't have any zones right now cooling in the house this isn't going to turn on okay so I'm going to turn one of the heating zones on in my house so that thing fires I'll make sure we don't have any issues alright guys just a peek here now at the gauge one more time you can see we're coming up to operating temperature and the pressures still looking pretty good that's pretty much gonna wrap it up so best thing I could tell you is if you notice that your heating system is getting noisy hear gurgling in the pipes through the radiators and baseboards in your house then go through a similar process like I just demonstrated here and it should solve your problem [Music]

Channel: Fix It With Zim

Views: 696,293

Keywords: remove air from boiler, purge air from boiler, noisy heat, heat making noise in house, air in pipes sound, air in pipes noise, boiler making bubbling sound, radiators making banging noise, baseboard heat not working, how to bleed air from baseboard heat, air in baseboard how to bleed, how to bleed boiler, how to bleed air from boiler, bleed air from hot water heating system, how to bleed air from hot water heating system, noise from heater, air in furnace, bleed air from pipes

Id: voS7Url50M4

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 12 2019