Annual boiler cleaning

I cleaned the boiler on September 23, 2008

Here is a picture of a new type of brush I picked up this summer; it is much improved over round brushes I used in the past. It is a wire brush and its shape is optimized for the space between the pins. Here is a picture of all the soot knocked down from the upper section of the boiler; I do not know how much is from last winter's B100 and how much is from the previous home owner's lack of maintenance. Next autumn will be telling.

Here is a picture of the combustion head before cleaning; it wasn't too bad with coke, but not perfect either.

Below is a picture of the top of the boiler after cleaning. You can see on the left side the fiber rope is missing, gone. The features where the smoke hood (not seen in this picture) flange down onto the cast iron have rusted away. It looks to me like there was a long-term leak from above down into this area of the boiler and the iron and sheet metal smoke hood rusted away.

Below is a close up of the sections post-cleaning. Nice.

Here is the boiler with the soot vacuum hose and the most front space is already vacuumed and clean.
Here is a picture of the tapered nylon I like to use after the steel brush is done, it knocks of the dust nicely (the steel brush does a great job of knocking the heavy soot off).

Here is a picture of the brush, it is not round, which makes it much easier to use; a real improvement over other brushes I have used.
Part of the cleaning included a new pre-filter upstream of the spin-on filter. As a reminder I was running a 50 micron felt pre-filter (General 1A canister type) and then a 10 micron spin on filter. At the supply house I saw they offered a 50 micron felt unit or a 20 micron rayon unit. I bought the rayon element.

Before I put the element in, I consulted with my excellent B100 dealer. He suggested rayon would not be compatible with B100. I decided to install it as an experiment; we are only using the boiler for hot water right now and our electric unit is still hooked up, just valved out.

After the cleaning I did combustion testing and set the boiler up; 350 gross stack temperature and 11% CO2 (good for 83.2% efficiency, NICE!). At the same time, I finished up the domestic hot water piping and we started using the boiler/water heater for DHW.