Miller Proctor Nickolas was contacted by Rivervue Tuckahoe Condominiums back in March of 2020 as they were having problems with their Raypak heating boilers. We visited the facility to take a look at what issues they were experiencing. By interviewing the members of the condominium board and reviewing the equipment through an audit of the boiler room, we found that there were several pieces of equipment that were not working properly.
Our approach was to take a step back, and look at what was required to make the boiler room function properly to provide heat for the building. What we found is one of the boilers needed to be replaced. It had reached the end of its lifetime, and upgrades were needed for the mechanical draft-inducing system. It had been operating for 20+ years.
Further investigation also revealed that the system had no lead-lag systems at all – it was missing. This means the boilers were operating without a smart master controller.
MPN put together a heating plan that included the primary focus of replacing one of their boilers.
Our solution was to work with the facility to provide a new boiler, upgrade all of the support equipment, including the mechanical draft-inducing system, installing a smart lead-lag system. We then also increased the safety of the building by installing a carbon monoxide and gas detection system in the boiler room.
The end result was an all-in-one solution to provide better heat for the building, in a safer way.
The first item that needed to be replaced was their Raypak boiler, which had to be replaced with an identical model due to specific requirements. Thankfully, Miller Proctor Nickolas is the authorized representative for Raypak in New York City.
The Raypak boiler you see in the video is a Raypak 3-million BTU naturally vented boiler. Raypak’s been building this boiler now for 30+ years. It’s a durable, reliable, simple boiler. Miller Proctor Nickolas was able to custom order an identical boiler to the one that was installed, pulled the existing unit out, and replaced it with the brand new, functioning boiler.
The replacement boiler is virtually identical to the boiler that was here 22 years ago, but now it’s got a better control system. The building supervisor is now able to see the inlet and outlet temperatures where he was not able to before. Everything is displayed in a digital format. It gives him a lot more information to work with, not to mention we’re able to monitor it and provide a remote alarm in case something goes wrong.
We then installed a TempTracker lead lag system, again, provided by Raypak. The Raypak TempTracker lead-lag system looks at the system header temperature and provides the necessary heat to maintain the required temperature in the loop. This is a very unique building in that it’s a heat pump loop. We are using these boilers to inject heat into the heat pump loop to supplement what the heat pumps are doing.
They were trying to maintain a system header temperature of around 80 degrees using conventional boilers. With the new controls on the boilers, we’re able to maintain higher temperatures while still injecting the required heat into the loop.
The next system that we focused on was the mechanical draft inducer because these boilers are natural draft boilers. The routing of the flue material venting in this building is extremely long with a short vertical chimney. The original designers of the upgrade 22 years ago installed a mechanical draft-inducing system. The draft inducers are located at the roof of the building with the controls down in the boiler room. Their existing draft control system was a constant speed system. So basically, the fan was on. It wasn’t saving any energy.
So we upgraded the ENERVEX system with a new system, with a variable speed drive and a special draft controller so that the fans drive on a variable speed control to maintain the required draft in the flue system. This saves a significant amount of electricity because now instead of the fans running at full speed, the fans are running at partial speed. That new ENERVEX system is now all interlocked with the appliances to make sure that the fans are only running when the appliances are running. That was something that wasn’t there before.
The last solution that we had was installing a gas detection system that monitors carbon monoxide and gas detection in the boiler room. This is more of a safety feature for the occupants of the building. So basically all the equipment will automatically shut down in the event of a gas leak or carbon monoxide buildup. So a big item to increase the safety of it.
And all of this was brought together as one assembly so that the operator is now able to come down and from one area in the boiler room, turn the boilers on and off. He no longer has to monitor each piece of equipment separately.
Everything is automated in one central location.