Who heats with cast iron radiators?

New to these things.
Curious if there's anything I can do to run more efficiently in my old house.

Oil furnace has been cleaned and tuned.
Radiators bled and all that.
Metered the radiators, some parts of the house (that we don't use) are near off.
Started insulating the pipes in the basement.
Any other tricks?

I have a burning question, but I believe a little situational reference is in order;
We turn the thermostat down to 52 or so at night.
Except for weekends, it doesn't get turned up to 62 until about 5pm.
So when we finally do kick it on, sucker needs to run awhile.
On weekends I turn it down to 52 at night, and back up to 62 when we wake.

So now the burning question:
Am I using more oil by turning it down so much at night?
I mean, would it be more cost effective to leave the temp at like 58 or something all day long?

I could figure this out on my own after a couple tanks of oil,
but I also figured one of you bastards must have gone through this before.

Set the thermostat and let it alone!

Oh man...my youth listening to pipes pinging. The big asbestos lined boiler and all the asbestos insulated pipes in the basement.

But yes my dad decided to save on fuel during the crisis in the 70's and was turning the heat down at night. He did realize there was no gain doing that and we froze in the morning,furnace ran for hours to get the heat back up.

Was bad enough that I probably had to spend most of my morning doing service calls/jumpstarts or sit on the tractor plowing, we needed to be heated up before facing the elements.

I think Mom won the battle over the thermostat settings but then Dad also bought and we installed insulation,lots of it.

used to have a gigantic old house (3500sf) with 30 or so double cast iron radiators. set the temp and leave it. bleed system properly. it depends on what kinda boiler system you have - if it's got a pump, the newer water pumps are so much more efficient, and about half the size/noise. get it serviced once by a tech who knows these systems - there are definitely some nuances to them, and they can be wildly inefficient if set up wrong.. a house call may only cost $100-$200 and will save that $ in a very short time... i'm assuming you have hardwood floors everywhere. the more rugs the better if the boiler is ancient, a new boiler will save you money.... mine was natural gas fired, and could easily use $600+ in gas a month.... a second service call once setup and running might help to get it tuned better. it's probably pretty poorly (if at all) insulated house, so it will never be warm................. bet those big vintage windows and high ceilings looked nice when you bought it :)

ah ha!
Very cool,
sounds like we'll be a bit warmer in the mornings then.
I know a certain lady who will be very happy about all of this.

I just had the boiler serviced.
Tech said it's never run better,
especially since he replaced the circulator pump.

What do you mean by 'bleed it properly'?
Is there more to it than just opening the valves until water comes out?

The house is 2000sq/ft.
Luckily, in this case, it has low ceilings.
All the downstairs windows have nice storms on them,
and they're all painted shut.
Upstairs windows have those tre-70s aluminum storm/window screens.
Those are pretty crappy.
But we don't heat the upstairs much.
Just our bath and our bedroom a little.
There's 2 other bed rooms;
one I have turned off completely,
the other has a broken valve and will remain ON till spring I guess.
We also have basically the back half of the downstairs nearly off as well.
Getting by with just heating the living, dining, kitchen and downstairs bath.

I'm not sure about the walls, but there's at least insulation in the attics.

We did have asbestos wrap on all the pipes,
but the PO, or one of them, had it removed.
I'm going around with fiberglass wrap.
Is it worthwhile to do the return (cold) pipes?
It's a 2-pipe system.

Set it, forget it; heat goes to cold.

Hot water or steam?

Hot water

+1 on the "set it and forget it" thing. It takes a long time and a lot of energy to heat everything back up. You not only have to bring your water supply from the radiators and piping runs up to temp, you're dealing with a cold flue, which works much more efficiently when warm.

Be sure that your boiler isn't short-firing (going through a lot of short cycles.) Many oil companies that do tune-ups put in far too large a nozzle. This means they can sell more oil. When your burner kicks on, it should be running for at least ten-fifteen minutes at a time. When it's really, really cold, (that is, as cold as it gets wherever you're from) it should be running pretty steadily. Also, make sure your barometric damper is properly set. You want the thing to breathe properly, to be sure, but you do not want excess heat escaping up the flue.

A fellow I used to fly with was a genuine heating engineer, and made a ton of money setting up boilers for large commercial outfits. He had no interest in selling oil. He came in and set up my household boiler, which had been previously serviced by the local oil company. The difference in oil consumption was fairly significant after he finished.

wish I could get my mother to understand the basics of thermodynamics - set and forget...

One thing you might add is a reflective panel behind the radiators. I installed copper sheet behind them one summer. Drained the entire system, pulled each one away from the wall and hung the 16ga copper sheet behind. It did help reflect some more of the heat into the rooms and dealt with some godawful paint/wallpaper behind the units.

Expensive but helpful and looks kind of cool. You could get some foil faced insulation to put in behind them.

I think you are fine, they can shake and rattle pretty good when they have air pockets in them. The ones at boarding school sure could sound scary at times.

I am trying to remember if we drained them at home for the summer but it has been so long. I sure remember bleeding them and also cleaning the boiler tubes in the big one at the shop, nasty job that as we burned all the used oil I had dumped in the tank over the summer. Lots of used oil, short intervals on oil changes back then....

If you want to upgrade someday, you could consider them wood/electric or wood/oil boilers. My friend has one of the later, expensive to buy and set up but he sure doesn't burn much oil. So much hot water for the radiant heat floors that even the toilet runs on hot water....his plumbing mistake that he never corrected. Nice warn throne always....

new pump makes a big difference.

hot water system is what i had.
when you bleed it you lower the pressure. you need to add water into the system to get the pressure back up. there is a water valve for this. it's a lb per every couple of foot rise i believe - also your expansion tank needs to work properly. you need enough pressure to make everything work. this is from memory - haven't messed with a hot water system in over 10 years...

google is your friend, surely there's a bunch of info out there on this...

This was going to be my next hot conversation piece.
Read some folks are simply covering cardboard in tin foil,
placing that behind their radiators....
Think I'll do this to a couple today and see what happens.

The walls certainly are shitty behind some of them.
Is it the radiators that are fucking up the plaster?
Or did some nincompoop leave the windows open a lot?

I'm a retarded googler.
I've tried for weeks,
and once again,
ADV (and greg mother fucking stainless!)
sets me straight in less than a day.

At the risk of your calling me names I'll venture a guess that the walls behind the radiators are f'ed up cause its a hard place to paint or clean plus heat attracts dust bunnies & damages paint.

Nah it's beyond just that.
A lot of the plaster behind these guys is straight up falling apart.

Some Reflectix radiant barrier against the wall behind the radiator should help direct heat into the room. I recall the older radiator heated buildings had the radiator in front of big windows and the draft from the windows distributed some of the heat - or so it seemed. Aluminum tape and Reflectix would be something I would try - the aluminum tape is intended to hold pieces of Reflectix together. Good luck!

Especially if the system has been opened in the past few years, bleed the pigs. Start at the top flow furthest from the boiler and bleed out the air. once a week at first then less often. You have a bleed valve key right?

yessir.

Should the boiler be off?

Take this as you will, I have worked on many old systems like this. Cast boiler, steel piping, cast rads. Air is probably not your problem. Have the "tech" come back and wire the circ pump to run full time. Buy a new digital thermostat, much more sensitive to room temps. Put it on hold temp. at the highest setting you are comfortable with. If your space overheats, drop it 1 degree at a time until you hit your target comfort zone. Then if you vacate the home during the day you can use the setback to your time away and lower the temp. no more than 4-5 degrees. Set it to come on 30-45 min. before you arrive home. This may pull all of the heat from the boiler, piping, etc. for you to use. The limit is probably set to 180. If the temp is satisfied that water is in your basement, not slowly warming your space as the pump does it's thing.
Does your bike get better mileage at a constant speed, or start and stop?

None of this is irreversible. Stay warm!

Boiler does not need to be off. But it helps if the pump isn't circulating, so air doesn't whip past the vent. If your vents have pipe threads you can add a small auto air vent for less then ten bucks. I don't have cast iron radiators just baseboard, but I pulled out three or four of the coin vents replaced them with the auto vents and it quieted things down a bunch after a day.

http://www.pexsupply.com/Bell-Gosse...ale-Threaded?gclid=CMDYv8DokrsCFeVcMgodFyYACA

Uh, move south.