Help flushing air out

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NewSkin

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Hello everyone. After watching numerous videos and reading online, I'm still a bit stumped as to what to do to get air out of my boilers water pipes.
What makes it confusing to me is that no two systems are the same, so I'm having problems locating the correct procedure to flush out the air. It is most likely something that is obvious to the trained eye, but I'm just not seeing it. I'll post pictures of what my setup looks like, any help is appreciated! As I've found two hose outlets near my enerjet boiler but not sure how to proceed. I've circled the two faucets where I believe only one of them I would need to attach the water hose to. I've also circled valves which I'm not sure if I need to adjust to get the water flowing or not. As well as one picture of a rusted valve, which in one video it said I need to open manually to refill the pipes. Any help is greatly appreciated, as it sounds like there are fish swimming in my pipes evertime the boiler turns on and I know it's loosing efficiency that way. Thank you for your time!6C94D7CA-D758-4862-B731-216B4A023BDB.jpegC2A08ABB-81F1-4F73-8456-D10F72537345.jpegD340784C-11D2-4FDD-9BB4-72B7EA198A52.jpeg92E59E02-3F9E-4E6D-A325-608A565C96D4.jpeg
 
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The valve shown has male threads. Do you have a valve with female threads?

Do you have bleeder valves on the upper floors? Are they frozen shut? Do you have helpers?

Does your system have an online operating & installation manual?

I'm surprised nobody posted yet to this thread.
 
Thanks for your reply Guzzle.

I would have to look closer when I get home later tonight to see if I have any valves with female threads. I'm not sure I see any in the pictures I took.

Upstairs it's all baseboards along the floors, with the water pipes behind them. Although I don't believe we have any bleeder valves though, because we actually had air flushed out about ten years ago and the HVAC crew that came to do it, never went upstairs, to my recollection anyway.

It's my parents home and I'm trying to help them save money by doing the flush myself. I do have my father as a willing helper though.

I know I have a papercopy of the system manual at home "Enerjet BG series", but it's only about 4 pages, and mentioned nothing about how to flush. I will go online to look for an operating & installation manual for my system once I get home later today. Hopefully it will have more information on the online one.

Thanks again for your reply, I very much appreciate it. I'll reply back once I find more answers to your questions. Thank you!
 
Post one or two of the videos that you saw, maybe I can translate them to layman's language.

Some I've seen have non-sequiturs & bad
camera work
audio
lighting
foreign accents.
 
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I double checked for bleeder valves upstairs and did not find any. Seems like they are all downstairs near the boiler itself.

I don't recall which videos I saw, as it was a few weeks ago but I did manage to find another, but was still unable to understand.





From what I could gather from the videos was that this house may have two zones? It's a raised ranch of that makes a difference.

I'm having problems figuring out whether I should drain the water through the outgoing pipe (which is hot when boiler is running) or the cold one next to the feeder valve. My uneducated guess is that it should be the hot one. Although those taco things that I supposedly need to put to "open" aren't even near the hose drains. If that makes any difference either, I'm not sure.

I tired looking for an online manual, but was unable to find one unfortunately.

Thanks again!
 
These videos pretty much scrambled my remaining brain cells.

First video summary, sometimes run at 3/4 speed 'cause he talked fast:
Shut the boiler off.
Drain the water from one valve.
You need to find & shut valves that prevent the water from going back into the boiler.
The makeup water pushes out all the air in the lines.
If you know the pipe sizes & lengths you can figure how much water is in the system. 100' of half inch pipe holds 1 gallon. Apparently he had more than 5 gallons.

The challenge for you is to map out the pipes & decide which is the drain valve.

Another necessary step happens at 8 min. with another valve.

Apparently the system cannot stand the 50PSI when everything is closed, the system can stand about 30 PSI, max.
It needs the 12 PSI from this water inlet pressure regulator fill valve while draining.
.
Got to 11 min. on the video to the expansion tank. At this point I decided that unless you’re certain what you’re doing have a pro do this slowly & watch them & take notes.

If you want to go forward anyway, post hand drawn pics of where each pipe goes. By a process of elimination we all can probably decode what each component does so your whole system will be mapped out.

Figuring this out was fun but I'm not the one risking mucking things up. If I had this system I'd probably do it in my own house with my plumber on speed dial. Know where your main water shut off is.

Can you wait 'til spring when you don't need heat?
 
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I think you're right Guzzle. I may need to just bite the bullet and call my plumber. Either that or wait for the spring time when it will be a bit warmer in case I make any mistakes or it takes more than a day to fix it. I think my system may have been changed from the last time we had it serviced because my parents had the plumber add more pipes to go to the car garage. So it makes it even more confusing to me.

Either way, I appreciate the help and your time tremendously. It's something that was a bit too involved for me and I don't want to make it worse for my folks if I was to make any errors. Thanks again!
 
listen , go to both ends on the rads, you should find on one end a thing called a purger . 1642883002196.png

You should put a rag under it and open it and let the air out .
 
And hope it closes again, like all infrequently-used valves. I'm afraid to test the TP relief valve on our WH.
you just open it a little until air or water starts to come out . the rag should pick up any water. once all the air is gone then close the bleeder.
 
Would I need to do this for all radiators? I took apart one but there were no purger valves on that one. I'll need to take apart another to see if that room has any purge valves. It seems whomever installed these just installed direct tubes.
 
I don’t know about your specific setup, but a number of years ago I helped my nephew do hot water in his house he was building and we both knew nothing about it.



I told him we need a way to fill it and a way to get the air out. We plumbed a line from his house water system into the lowest point in the system. next to it we placed a valve that would block the flow of water in the heating loop and next to that we had a T with a valve that lets water out of the system. To fill the system we would close the middle valve and open the drain valve and then turn on the house supplied water the water entering the loop would push all the air out of the loop and we would hear air sputtering mixed with water just like when you fill a garden hose. After the air stopped we would close both valves and open the loop valve and the system was air free.



Every year in the fall he repeats the process and never has had a problem.

I wonder if you don’t have something similar.
 
I ended up having the system bled and a faulty air valve changed out. I remember that air valve leaking a couple months back and that's along the time the sounds began. I remember just screwing on the little cap and didn't realize that air had probably entered into the system at that point already. Although I would normally try it myself with all you guys help, This was something I needed to get right the first time. Being my folks that live there. You're right Guzzle, probably best to try this myself when my folks don't rely on the heat every day let alone night. Same with billshack, it was the bleed/air valve that would end up being the piece of the puzzle. I wish they had the ones you showed me though. What I ended up doing is what bud16415 is saying. Just had to do it in the right order. Thanks again for the help fellas. I really appreciate your time. Now I need to figure out how to get the aquastat relay to stop buzzing. But that's for another post. Thanks again.
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