On Aug 25, 5:04*pm, The Daring Dufas
wrote:
On 8/25/2010 8:04 AM, harry wrote:
On Aug 25, 7:19 am, The Daring
wrote:
On 8/24/2010 11:23 PM, notbob wrote:
On 2010-08-25, * *wrote:
to rewire a plug, while 54 per cent did not know how to bleed a
* *radiator....
I'm thinking, "what the hell is 'bleed a radiator'", not realizing,
for a few seconds, this does not mean a car radiator. *I suspect a
large majority of folks in the US haven't a clue about how to bleed a
steam radiator, having never seen one. *Are there even radiators west
of the Mississippi?
nb
When I was a first grader back in the middle of the last century, the
Catholic Parochial Gulag I was remanded to had steam heat via radiators.
I remember the hissing of the water separator doodad on the side of the
big old silver painted cast iron radiators. It was an old building then
and it had tall ceilings, transom windows, incandescent lights hanging
from the ceiling that had the half silvered big bulbs and of course, no
air conditioning. This was in North East Alabamastan and I don't see
steam except in hospitals and very old buildings, in fact, the steam
plant in downtown Birmingham is scheduled to shut down in 2013 because
of of too few customers. It is supplying steam to the UAB hospital
complex and other institutions in the area so UAB is looking at building
its own plant for $69 million. I have done some work in the basements
of some of the downtown buildings that got their steam from the existing
steam plant and the area around the steam meter was a bit warm. The
steam meter looks a lot like a water meter. There are steam
leeks all under those old buildings and I remember a steam line bursting
on a street a few years ago under a car that cooked the
occupants like lobsters.
http://blog.al.com/businessnews/2010...eam_plant.html
http://preview.tinyurl.com/2wb86ml
TDD
Talking about your university, they gotta be mad these days. *In
Europe NOBODY uses steam for distribution, it's being ripped out
everywhere. *Anything to do with steam is massively costly to install
and maintain and massively inefficient. * They will struggle to find
people who can run this plant too.
They also use it in the various laboratories which are quite numerous
in the area for sterilizing equipment. There is a lot of existing
infrastructure that would cost a great deal. The university has several
chilled water plants to produce chilled water for air conditioning the
hospital and campus buildings. Some years ago I did some work in one
of the plants. It's quite interesting to see 4,000 ton compressors
and cooling tower fan blades that look like something off a C-130
cargo plane. Lots of really big stuff running off 4,160 volt three
phase power.
TDD- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
I was well into steam sterilisers. We used to have lots of big ones
in the pharmacy and for sterilising fabrics and surgical instrument
etc. However it became cheaper to buy stuff in and a lot of stuff
became disposable. There was a big debate on prions (mad cow disease)
as to whether they could survive the steam autoclave cycle or not.
Anyway the remaining autoclaves had a steam generator built in or
adjacent.
We had cold water generators for AC. At one place we had steam
powered refrigeration. The steam was a byproduct. Again, very
inefficient, we only ran it because the steam would have been dumped
anyway. We shut the lot down and saved a fortune in energy costs.