Help Utica boiler

[mehmet sarikcioglu]

Hi I have a utica natural gas boiler that is about 10-15 yrs old (my guess)
Recently bought house and my first concern was that the boiler water gets up to temp which is 180 and shuts off while there is still a call for heat. In my last home i would remember the boiler would run until it satisfied the thermostat temp and then shutoff. (maybe its normal im not sure)

Most importantly
I wokeup today to no heat and boiler wouldnt fire. I first changed out the pilot assembly as i had a spare one on hand thinking that is my issue, nothing.
Realized expansion tank was bad so changed that along with the hy vent.Still nothing
Did some troubleshooting and manually opened a zone valve and the boiler automatically fired right up.
Changed the thermostat to see if thats my issue and still same sypmtoms

For now i have heat to my second zone by using the manual lever.

My next guess is that the power head on the zone is bad. Should i change the powerhead or the whole zone valve with powerhead?

I have 3 zones in my home
The basement, The first floor, and second floor,
Both basement and second floor automatically work when thermostat calls for heat and the first floor only works when manually opening the zone valve.

Any insight would be great

 

[Dana]

Sounds like the zone valve is toast, more likely to be the head than the valve itself, since it can be opened manually. Be sure to check for broken or poorly connected wiring, which could also cause it to not function. Swapping the thermostat wires from a working zone over to the non-functioning head/valve would be a quick way to test whether it's the wiring or the valve.

Is there a zone controller controlling the system, with all thermostats & zone valves wired to the control box, or are the thermostats wired directly to the zone valves?

It's pretty common to find cast iron boilers oversized even for the whole house radiation, and are almost always oversized for the radiation on a single zone on 3-zone systems. When the boiler is pouring more heat into the system than the zone radiation emits it will always run up to the high-limit temperature. If the zone radiation is pretty limited relative to the boiler's heat output it can even short-cycle the boiler into lower efficiency and a shorter lifespan.

For a cast iron boiler to have reasonable efficiency & longevity the minimum burn times need to be at least 5 minutes, with no more than 5 burn cycles per hour. If your burn cycles are shorter or more frequent than that it's worth installing a retrofit heat purging boiler control such as the Intellicon HW+ or HydroStat 3250 Plus, which will typically save more than 10% on fuel use (by lowering standby & cycling losses) and put less wear & tear on the gas valve & ignition components by reducing the total number of burn cycles.

 

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[mehmet sarikcioglu]

I believe there is a controller but i am not certain, I didnt want to mess with the other valves just yet and do anything wrong.Also the lever to manually open the valve seems hard whereas the other 2 are very easy to open. Gunna run to home depot to see if they have a valve zone in stock and change it.