On Jan 2, 10:31*pm, Dairy Godmother wrote:

HI board. *I love my old house but am learning about it as I go -
including my one-pipe steam heating system. *The boiler is new and
works great (dont know specs) and until a recent outage here in CT it
was all working well. *Then, after a 24 hour outage, my radiators in
the office room started clanging away. *Being 'clever' I decided to
turn the radiator vent up -- which did indeed stop the clanging.
Stopping the heat in that room was no problem -- but what I didnt
realize is that it would stop heat in other rooms upstairs. *Now, I
put the vent back and none of the upstairs radiators seem to be
working properly. *They are all barely warm, but its definitely colder
upstairs now. *And oil is expensive!

What did I do wrong? Did I likely dislodge some 90 year old grime that
is now blocking the steam?

I don't have any experience with this stuff, and am happy to hire my
plumber back, but I'd like to learn if its a simple fix.

As Ransley said, the heatinghelp.com site is about the best there is
for steam heating questions and information. You didn't do any damage
to your system by fiddling with a vent - though it is unclear what you
did exactly. The vents just let air out ahead of the steam as air and
steam don't play well together. If the air is not let out, the steam
cannot come in to heat up the radiator. You said you turned the vent
up - does that mean you physically rotated the whole vent? If so,
it's odd terminology as the vent is normally pointing up and what is
sometimes done to "turn off" a radiator is to turn the vent so it is
pointing down. Please clarify what you did.

Blocking one radiator, or even removing it, will not shut down the
rest of the heating system. It will affect the heat output, but I
can't see how that would almost turn off the upstairs heating. You
should start with the simple things first. Vents don't last forever,
and they can get blocked if your heating plant is putting out dirty
steam. They're cheap enough and easy enough to install, so that would
probably be a good place to start. The vents you get from the Borg
are pretty much crap. Go to a real plumbing supply house and get some
Gorton vents. The Gorton web site has info on what vent to use in
what area of your house.

The other flag was your mention of a new boiler. A new boiler
installation can frequently stir up a lot of crap and produce dirty
steam. It is very likely that the new boiler wasn't skimmed after
installation. That takes a lot of time, but is simple enough to do.
The heatinghelp web site will have more information on that, as will
the boiler manufacturer's site.

R