You have a need for steam. So you have a boiler. That boiler needs fuel to run. Every month you operate, therefore, you’re having to find a sweet spot between your steam output and your fuel costs. But there are some things you can do to improve the efficiency of your boiler, and squeeze more steam out of every dollar you spend on firing it.
MAINTAIN
The number one thing you can do to optimize the performance of your boiler is to keep your system properly serviced and maintained. Regular inspections and checkups from a trained professional will ensure that your equipment is always running at its best. Cleaning water tubes, fire tubes, and burners on a regular basis will keep them free of buildup, and let them do their jobs properly. Regular maintenance will also keep mechanical linkages tight, eliminating the slack that can cause you to lose efficiency.
YOUR FAVORITE TUNE
The first thing you can do to boost boiler efficiency is to make sure your burners are properly tuned. Every flame in a boiler’s furnace needs three things to operate: fuel, oxygen, and a spark. There’s a delicate balance of the first two that must be maintained during the combustion process, and if that balance is off at all, you’ll end up using more fuel, getting less steam, or both. A trained boiler professional can find the ideal mixture of air and fuel by adjusting fuel flow, fuel pressure, damper settings, and air flow rate. Once everything is tuned properly, you’ll be squeezing every last BTU out of every last cent.
WATER QUALITY
Water is one of the most important factors in boiler performance, and not just because it makes steam. The water that goes into your boiler can determine how much you get out of it, because of everything that can potentially accompany that water. If your feedwater has too many dissolved solids, especially calcium, magnesium, and iron, you can end up creating scale inside your pressure vessel.
Scale is a distant cousin to the buildup you’ll see on your shower nozzle if you have hard water. It’s basically a collection of mineral deposits that settle on the walls of your pressure vessel and tubes, made even more tenacious by the heat and pressure involved. If scale is allowed to build up, it’ll end up acting as an insulating layer that will hamper heat transfer from the fire side to the water side. If you don’t deal with it, you’ll end up spending more and more on fuel to get the same amount of steam.
To get rid of these dissolved solids, you have to make sure your boiler system includes a water softener. A water softener removes calcium and magnesium ions by passing the water through a membrane filled with resin beads coated in sodium ions. As the water moves through, the harmful ions are stripped away and replaced with the less-harmful ones, and your chance of scale is greatly reduced. There are also a range of other chemical additives that can be used to fight scale, in addition to your water softener. WARE carries them all in our online Boiler Warehouse, so check them out.
GET CONTROL
Modern boiler control systems are leaps and bounds ahead of where they were even a decade ago. Control systems from makers like AUTOFLAME® use a network of dedicated sensors to monitor every performance parameter of your boiler, and use that data to make adjustments in real time to compensate for changes in temperature, load, or environmental conditions. Since the computer can think and act faster than a human, the control system ends up saving a substantial amount of fuel in the long run by making lots of tiny adjustments, very quickly.
By using variable-speed pumps and motors in your boiler system, you allow your control system an even greater range of capability because it can make more precise adjustments to multiple system parameters. When everything runs in perfectly balanced harmony, you get the best efficiency, and you end up spending less to run your boiler.
ECONOMIZE
Heat transfer isn’t 100% efficient, because physics gets in the way. However, one of the best ways you can minimize the loss of waste heat is with an economizer. Normally, any excess heat that’s left over after combustion ends up being vented through the stack and lost forever. However, with an economizer in place, that heat is recaptured before it can escape and rerouted back to the feedwater. Since the economizer ends up pre-heating the feedwater, it doesn’t take as much energy to convert it to steam. Depending on the size of the boiler system, an economizer can generate thousands, tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of pounds of extra steam per day, which is just like free fuel dollars added back into your pocket.
INSULATE
When it’s cold, you put a coat on. It helps hold in the heat of your body, and helps you stay warm. Boilers are pretty much the same way. If you want to avoid losing ambient heat through the external surfaces of your boiler, simply wrap it up. A properly insulated boiler system will keep more heat in the system, reducing the overall amount of fuel that has to be burned to make steam.
RECOVER CONDENSATE
Reusing as much of your condensate as possible helps in the same way that an economizer does. Heat that would normally be lost instead ends up going back into circulation, reducing the overall amount of heat needed to keep the steam cycle going. You’ve already paid for the fuel to make the heat, you might as well get as much of it working for you as you can. And you will save the cost of the makeup water and chemicals to treat that makeup water.
Whatever you need to keep your boiler running at maximum efficiency, WARE is here to help. We have the expertise, the parts and supplies, and the training to help you get more steam for your money. Just let us know how we can help.