Hot Noise

My home is heated with hot water baseboards fed by a boiler.  Boilers are somewhat persnickety.  What I mean by persnickety is loud and leaky.  My boiler was installed with a couple of mysterious fittings and valves that simply hang there in mid-air slowly leaking out scaly orange and grey stalactites.  Years ago, I had to place a bowl under one of these valves to catch leaking gunk.

That bowl is still there.  Long ago, the matching bowls were discarded when we purchased new dinnerware.  By this point, I have become somewhat fond of the bowl.

  

Here is another thing: dust bunnies seek out boilers just before they die.  I often find such forsaken bunnies slowly swirling around on the linoleum in front of my boiler when my boiler fires to satisfy heating needs at some far corner of my house.

For the last three weeks my boiler has been working pretty steady.  As I mentioned earlier, my boiler is loud by nature.  Propane boilers—such as mine—sound like the first cousin to a fighter jet when they fire.

 

And then you get air in the system.

For the last three weeks my boiler has been working pretty steady with air in the system.  The air seems to “hit” the boiler toward the end of each heating cycle.

The sounds are horrendous.

Sometimes, my boiler sounds like the giant mechanical equivalent of 20 pounds of cat gacking up a hairball.  At other times, you might think that the drummer from an eighties hair band is trying to solo his way out of the boiler and associated pipes.

Heating my house has never been so fun.

     

--Mitchell Hegman

P.S.  I am working on it…