plumbers Richmond Safety first - boilers
To define and secure boilers safely, some professional specialized organizations such as the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) develop standards and regulation codes. For instance, the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is a standard providing a wide range of rules and directives to ensure compliance of the boilers and other pressure vessels with safety, security and design standards.
Historically, boilers were a source of many serious injuries and property destruction due to poorly understood engineering principles. Thin and brittle metal shells can rupture, while poorly welded or riveted seams could open up, leading to a violent eruption of the pressurized steam. When water is converted to steam it expands to over 1,000 times its original volume and travels down steam pipes at over 100 kilometres per hour. Because of this, steam is a great way of moving energy and heat around a site from a central boiler house to where it is needed, but without the right boiler feed water treatment, a steam-raising plant will suffer from scale formation and corrosion. At best, this increases energy costs and can lead to poor quality steam, reduced efficiency, shorter plant life and unreliable operation. At worst, it can lead to catastrophic failure and loss of life. Collapsed or dislodged boiler tubes can also spray scalding-hot steam and smoke out of the air intake and firing chute, injuring the firemen who load the coal into the fire chamber. Extremely large boilers providing hundreds of horsepower to operate factories can potentially demolish entire buildings
Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler
Boiler - accessories
Pressuretrols to control the steam pressure in the boiler. Boilers generally have 2 or 3 pressuretrols: a manual-reset pressuretrol, which functions as a safety by setting the upper limit of steam pressure, the operating pressuretrol, which controls when the boiler fires to maintain pressure, and for boilers equipped with a modulating burner, a modulating pressuretrol which controls the amount of fire.
Safety valve: It is used to relieve pressure and prevent possible explosion of a boiler.
Water level indicators: They show the operator the level of fluid in the boiler, also known as a sight glass, water gauge or water column.
Bottom blowdown valves: They provide a means for removing solid particulates that condense and lie on the bottom of a boiler. As the name implies, this valve is usually located directly on the bottom of the boiler, and is occasionally opened to use the pressure in the boiler to push these particulates out.
Continuous blowdown valve: This allows a small quantity of water to escape continuously. Its purpose is to prevent the water in the boiler becoming saturated with dissolved salts. Saturation would lead to foaming and cause water droplets to be carried over with the steam ? a condition known as priming. Blowdown is also often used to monitor the chemistry of the boiler water.
Flash tank: High-pressure blowdown enters this vessel where the steam can 'flash' safely and be used in a low-pressure system or be vented to atmosphere while the ambient pressure blowdown flows to drain.
Automatic blowdown/continuous heat recovery system: This system allows the boiler to blowdown only when makeup water is flowing to the boiler, thereby transferring the maximum amount of heat possible from the blowdown to the makeup water. No flash tank is generally needed as the blowdown discharged is close to the temperature of the makeup water.
Źródło: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiler
Frequent failures of hydraulics at home
Plumbing provide us comfort use of water in our homes. Thanks to them increases our comfort, but sometimes they also experience some problems. In many of them there are defects that cause us a lot of disadvantages, the most common failure of this type are broken pipe, broken seals, clogged drains and the like. Not every such failure can repair itself, and is of great importance here, of course, time. The sooner we get rid of it the better, so you should call in this case the appropriate service to take care of it. Today, we find many of them, so it will not be for us to pose any problem. It is better to immediately deal with failure, because the longer we wait, the more it will cause inconvenience.