My pink house is now green. Green – as in – environmentally friendly.
On March 10, 2011, we assassinated our old cast-iron, oil-fired boiler. It wasn’t pretty, but it had to be done.
The old behemoth wasn’t really that old. It was born in Utica, New York in early 2002, and was, in fact, a Utica (brand-name) boiler. When we purchased this cold house in March 2007, we were told that the Utica was a higher end boiler, and should provide good service for years to come. It was rated at 200,000 BTUs, which is a lot of heating power for 2,300 square feet.
During Winter 2010, oil prices started up (again). In three months’ time, we burned more than $1,600 in fuel oil. In January 2011, when Mr. Oil Fill-Man appeared in my back yard (a scant 27 days after his last visit), I ran outside to chat with him.
“We’re taking 160+ gallons of fuel oil each time you come by,” I told him. “Is that normal for this area?”
“Yes M’am,” he replied. “In this neighborhood, every house I visit is taking between 150-200 gallons of heating oil.”
This told me that my neighbors were apoplectic over their heating bills, as well.
Talking with two of my neighbors, I’d found that they’d converted from old oil boilers (about the same age as mine), to high-efficiency tankless gas-fired boilers. Both neighbors told me that their heating bills had dropped from $500 – $600 a month to about $125 – $150 a month. Both were delighted with the new system and the new savings.
I was not that surprised to hear that these two neighbors also removed their fairly young oil-fired boilers and replaced them with this fancy new system.
Since purchasing the house in March 2007, we’d added several high-dollar storm doors, plus several ultra-high efficiency replacement windows (on the rear and side), and we’d repaired and re-caulked existing storm windows on the remaining windows. We’d also used up 40 tubes of caulk (yes, 40), closing up every little crack and crevice.
When it was time to get estimates for the new work, I had many choices, but the big two were: Gas-fired boiler or Heat Pump?
The benefits of a heat pump were simple: It’d give us the chance to add central air to the first floor. (We already had a central air system for the upstairs.)
Unfortunately, we learned that adding new ductwork for the first floor would have made our basement well-nigh unusable.
The other factor was, I love my radiators. They’re old and funky and they rattle and pop in the winter. I was not ready to abandon the old charm of the 1920s cast-iron radiators. Plus, it’s true what they say: Radiant heat is the most comfortable, even heating in the world.
So that left us with one more set of choices: Cheap it out with a regular, average efficiency gas-fired boiler, or go ahead and spend the extra dough and go with a high-efficiency (90%+) unit.
The lower end gas boilers were $3,000 and up (for 80% efficiency), but required that we install a new liner in the old brick chimney. That’d add another $2000 to our costs, so we were at $5000. For $7,500, we could get a super-high efficiency gas-fired boiler, rated at 94% efficient, which used a pvc snorkel. That would enable us to abandon the old chimney, and get our heating bills down under $200 a month. And, we’d get a $500 rebate from our local gas company, making the price difference between the two options a scant $2,000 (or the cost of 100 days of fuel oil).
We opted for the high efficiency tankless gas-fired unit.
Several things went wrong along the way. The high-efficiency gas boiler was ordered, but didn’t arrive. That’s okay, we were told, they’d upgrade us to a better system, no extra cost. Sounded good. Oopsie, more trouble. The better system had a lag time too, so we’d have to wait three weeks for unit to arrive. But then, the company had located the unit we’d contracted for and we went forward with the installation.
Next, Virginia Natural Gas drove us nuts. They would not set a meter for us until the boiler was in place. That’s funny, because the contractor didn’t want to set up the new boiler until we had a meter in place.
In the end, Virginia Natural Gas won. No meter would be installed until the boiler was in place and complete. Dealing with VNG was an enormous hassle. For a time, I really missed dealing with Miller Oil. They were so friendly and accommodating.
Once the boiler work was mostly done (and we knew it would soon be ready to be turned on), we called Virginia Natural Gas for the 3,492nd time. It was a Thursday afternoon.
“The next available date on our calendar is Friday afternoon,” the operator told me.
Friday, as in eight days away. We’d already been two days with no heat or hot water. We were already greasy and cold. A bad combination.
After I made a few screeching noises, she moved the date up to Saturday, between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm.
Friday evening, we got an automated call from Virginia Natural Gas. It said that our meter would be set on Saturday morning, between 1:15 am and 1:15 am, and to make sure someone would be home at that time.
Watching television in our living room, wrapped up in blankets, we listened to the voice mail and laughed out loud through chattering teeth.
Saturday morning, my optimistic husband got up and went outside to check for the meter.
“They didn’t come at 1:15 am,” he said with a bit of disappointment.
About 2 pm, Mr. Meterman showed up. He looked at the gas line poking out from the house, and said serenely, “There’s no way I can hook this up. They ran the line in the wrong place.”
I fell on my knees and begged. From my close-to-the-ground position, I hugged his legs and told him that we were making mortgage payments on a cave, and that I’d lost feeling in my fingers the day before, and could he please, please, please give us a little heat?
Surreptitiously, I rubbed my greasy hair against his pants leg. He scrunched up his face, groaned and took a step back.
Moved by my impassioned pleas, he forced the modernistic, bright yellow piping this way and that, and managed to get the gas meter set in place.
Virginia Natural Gas had told us that Mr. Meterman would fire up our appliances. Mr. Meterman said he was not permitted to fire up our appliances.
Fortunately, Mr. Brandy-New Boiler sprang right to life when turned on, and for the first time in 72 hours, we had hot water again.
Monday morning, the contractor re-appeared and got the boiler going, and Monday afternoon, our radiators were once again filled with hot water, making their trademark snap, crackle and pop noises.
My house is warm again. And it’s a good, comfortable warmth. And best of all, it’s a high efficiency warmth. 🙂
This is the only picture I have of the old oil burner. I'd intended to snap a few before photos when the work started, but was so stressed out by all the upset of my house being torn up (again), that I thought, "ah, forget it." This photo was taken in March 2007 when we first looked at the house.
The poor old Utica, as it's being hauled off for scrap. Notice the heavy cast-iron boiler on the front. Workers estimated this rig weighed about 400 pounds.
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A view of the new equipment (and our old basement).
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Close-up
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This photo shows the complexity of all those pipes. Lot of stuff going on there!
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And outside, it looks like this. The white PVC pipe is an air intake for combustion. The silver is for exhaust. The red area around the border is where my house is bleeding from the jagged, rough and ugly cutting. The house cried out in pain, but I was the only one who could hear the throes of agony.
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I was pretty unhappy with the work done by Thing One and Thing Two. The hole on the left was the contractor-created hole for the natural gas piping. They used a bright-yellow 1" gas line and it was not attractive. Monday morning, the contractor agreed to remove the misplaced yellow line and replace it with black-iron pipe, in the hole to the right. You can see (from this picture), how awkward the placement of that left-side hole is. The yellow gas line continues just inside the house.
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Close-up of the pain. The hole on the right was the original hole, where a gas line was run many, many years ago. If the contractor had simply used that hole in the first place (as I requested), it would have saved us all a lot of trouble.
And there's a handy dandy little gauge on the wall that measures boiler temps and domestic hot water temps. Highly entertaining.
Instructional literature shows that the tankless boiler is a happy little thing.
But he can get frustrated pretty quickly. Not sure what he's doing here...
My pretty, pretty pink and green house!
Another view
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your combustion air intake looks very close to the ground if you are in a area where it snows.