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When our heating system turned on for the first time last night, it seemed to work fine... until Kim heard a dripping sound start near the furnace a couple of hours later. Turns out that the expansion tank attached to the radiator system had sprung a pinhole leak, which was gleefully spraying warm water across the furnace room. Our attempts to patch over it with tape were ineffective (too much pressure, I guess), but they did replace the wild spray with a steady trickle. So we put a bucket underneath, turned off a valve that we hoped would do some good (the trickle did slow, but only slightly), and waited for morning.
Well, we sort of waited. The leak was producing about two gallons of water per hour, and our largest bucket holds about five gallons. So I got up every two hours or so to pop down and empty it out. When morning finally rolled around, I called the plumbers whom the previous owners had told us "know the house inside and out". They had a guy who was able to come to the house right between my two morning classes, and it was a pretty quick fix. I even learned what a few of the valves do!
All in all, not a pleasant night, but for our first potential major home crisis I think it went remarkably well.
Well, we sort of waited. The leak was producing about two gallons of water per hour, and our largest bucket holds about five gallons. So I got up every two hours or so to pop down and empty it out. When morning finally rolled around, I called the plumbers whom the previous owners had told us "know the house inside and out". They had a guy who was able to come to the house right between my two morning classes, and it was a pretty quick fix. I even learned what a few of the valves do!
All in all, not a pleasant night, but for our first potential major home crisis I think it went remarkably well.
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A few nitpicky things:
1. If you have an expansion tank, radiator, and (had) a leak, you have a boiler, not a furnace. Boilers boil water. Furnaces, uh, 'furn' air.
2. If the valve was between the boiler and the pipe that runs _only_ to the exp tank, you shouldn't close it unless you want to flirt with a much bigger 'leak'. The expansion tank accommodates the expanding water as it heats up. The next place the water goes if the expansion tank is not available is out your pressure relief valve and on to the floor. Of particular interest here is that pressure relief valves, especially old ones, have an annoying tendency to not fully close once they have opened. Glad this didn't happen!
Hmm. 2 above is for a hydronic (hot water) system. If you have a steam system, I don't know how those work in great detail, or even if they have exp tanks...
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2. Fortunately for us, we appear to live in a state where code prohibits a valve between the boiler and the expansion tank. (Or at least, whoever installed our system decided that would be a bad idea.) We were pretty sure that the valve we'd closed was just cutting off the rest of the house (the expansion tank just branches off along a main pipe); our hope was that doing so might allow the pressure in the tank to drop a bit (since it no longer had to support such a tall column of water). But I'm glad to be learning more about what's going on in the system: it's entirely possible that if there had been a valve on the other side, I would have closed it to stop the leak without really understanding the risk of doing so (sleep can seem awfully tempting...).
Oh, and I wouldn't think a steam system would need an expansion tank. Heating a liquid at constant volume generates MUCH more pressure than the same heating of a gas. (I just assigned that problem to my statmech students a week or two ago, in fact.)
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And they don't. Or at least, ours doesn't have one. Our boiler meltdown of '04 happened because of low water, not high pressure. Thank goodness for insurance.
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