Steam Traps and Orifice Plates, Oh My!

Sometimes the smallest parts can play an outsized role in reducing your building’s energy consumption. If you’ve got radiators, look no further than the steam trap or the oddly named orifice plate to see how these components, with a bit of diligence and care, can really deliver significant savings to your building’s energy usage. Habitat’s Carol Ott interviews Spencer Kraus, Vice President of Fred Smith Plumbing, to learn the ins and outs of the dynamic role these small parts can play.

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Transcript

Carol Ott: Welcome to Problem Solved, a conversation about challenges facing New York's co-op and condo board directors. I'm Carol Ott of Habitat Magazine, and with me today is Spencer Kraus, vice President of Fred Smith Plumbing. New York's Local Law 97 has many board directors in a twist. They want to comply with carbon reduction requirements, but are flabbergasted at the cost of some of the technology that will get their buildings to the finish line.

Spencer, you have worked with buildings who focused on jiggling smaller, less expensive things to get significant results. Can you tell us the kinds of things that you've done? 

Spencer Kraus: Sure. So some of the main expenses when you think about carbon footprint everyone always thinks about oil and gas.

One of the main expenditures and carbon footprints that building creates is during the heating season. The boiler kicks on. You use all your energy to heat up the water and create steam pressure and it goes up through the building and heats the apartments through the various radiators.

Each radiator has a specific steam trap. And that steam trap will stay open until the heat gets to it, at which point the element inside the trap expands and cuts off the flow, allowing for the steam to stay in the radiator and radiate the heat throughout the apartment. It's not necessarily this new local law that has come out that has us sort of pushing the changing of the traps. We've always told buildings that you should look and monitor your traps because there's a significant amount of savings, especially at the end of the year, when it comes to having appropriate and maintain traps throughout the building.

It's a very significant amount. And with this new local law, because people are looking at their carbon footprint. To me, that also seems like an energy bill, right? So if you lower your carbon footprint, you should also be lowering your energy bill. It's like a two for one when it comes to the traps. 

Carol Ott: Let me ask you. So I have a radiator in my apartment. I obviously, and I'm sure I'm like anybody. I don't know what a steam trap. You say it's in the radiator. I can't see it. I don't see something labeled. So who would know about steam traps? Is it the super's job to know this?

Spencer Kraus: That's an interesting question. A trap breaks open. If you open your radiator and you're constantly getting flow through it, I think the super downstairs would know, would have a better idea that trap is broken because of the heat and steam that's coming down the condensate line. If the trap breaks closed, you're not gonna have anywhere for that air in the radiator to flow out. So your radiator's gonna be cold. So the tenant would have a better idea of what's happening with that particular trap in that instance.

But the tenants, I think and the super for that matter would be the ones that are paying attention to it. But downstairs you have a condensate. The way it works is the steam comes up, trap opens up, allows the air to flow out and fills with steam. The trap closes, locks in the steam, it radiates its heat, turns into water , and then the trap opens up and allows the water out. This condensate return line goes downstairs and it picks up all the other traps on that riser. So you have A, B, C, D, E, however big your building is. When you get down to the basement, they collect on an overhead and flow back to hopefully either a boiler or a condensate tank or a functioning vacuum pump. In which case it gets recycled.

The problem is that when the steam goes into the condensate return system. Let's say you're in apartment five and you have a trap that's open. Your steam is now gonna fill the condensate line with higher than 212 degrees steam. At which point the steam traps on the condensate return line side --

you know how I told you the steam comes up and it tells the trap to close. Now you have open steam line into the condensate return line, telling the traps along that line to close. And that overworks the trap and could essentially damage it. But the super downstairs, if they have gauges or they see that the condensate pump might be defective or leaking or the pumps downstairs. There's ways to see if you have live steam in the condensate. It shouldn't be overheated like that. And that wreaks havoc on the system. 

Carol Ott: Let me just ask you. It would seem to me that, without knowing the difficulty or the expense, which I actually wanna get from you, one could have a regular maintenance schedule that I don't know how long steam traps are supposed to last, but whatever that period is, then you just change all the steam traps in a building. So how long do these steam traps typically last, and how complicated is it to have a program like that? 

Spencer Kraus: It depends on the manufacturer. There's usually the elements inside and depends on the particular trap. But you have at least a good five, 10 year mark there. And it really depends on the manufacturer. But once you change your traps, let's just say a whole building changes their traps. It's an expensive job, but you do save almost 30% on your energy. We've seen savings of 30% on the energy bill. Now, depending on what size your building is, that's huge. It's huge. And after a year or two, depending on again, the size of the building, that could pay for that whole job and more.

Carol Ott: When you say it's an expensive job, tell me -- 

Spencer Kraus: So let's say your apartment has three radiators. Every apartment has three radiators. Depending on the size of the building, you have to get access to the radiator, you have to unhook, but there's usually a union of some kind and you have to screw on the trap and replace it. And then you obviously wanna check your work at the end to make sure that there's no defective parts that being installed. But let's just say that's not the issue. Let's just say that the traps installed are non defective and they work. The best time to schedule these repairs and replacements of the traps is during the off season. The summertime is essentially the best time to do it. But the cost is really the time that it takes to get into the apartments and change it.

But one of the things that we come across is that, one apartment will say, okay, change all my radiator traps. You don't wanna change horizontally. You wanna change vertically. So you'd rather change all of the traps on a riser, rather than on the whole floor. And what happens is when you replace just the traps on one floor, you're not addressing all the other traps on the riser.

If you have a defective trap on eight and it's overworking the A line, you're better off changing one. If it's gonna come down to a maintenance program for a building, you're better off getting on a look at the manufactured recommendation that says test and replace every five or 10 years or whatever.

If it was up to me and I had to do that and have to come up with a budget, I would maybe have the A line addressed one year. And then maybe the next year do the B line and so on and so forth. 

Carol Ott: And how long, just gimme an idea of how long it takes to do one radiator.

Spencer Kraus: Oh it's not very long. Again, it depends on the radiator and the size and the location. Every building has some tenants who have done these wonderful renovations where they've installed the hard enclosures, and now you have to get a carpenter to remove it. But if everything's accessible it's an hour, maybe two not even. We've had jobs where a guy can replace eight radiator traps in one day just because they're accessible and you have access. 

Carol Ott: And just speak to me just a bit about orifices. Because that's another little thing in a radiator. 

Spencer Kraus: Yeah. So it's similar to the two pipe steam system, which is what I just described. The orifice system is very similar. Instead of an element, they have an orifice and it's just a essentially a-- 

Carol Ott: Like a quarter. 

Spencer Kraus: Yeah, it's a quarter with a little hole in it. And that allows a specific amount of steam through and condensate through.

These orifice systems were designed to allow the lower floors would have smaller orifice and the smaller hole. And apartments that are further away would have larger ones, depending on the pressure of the building, which would allow for an even distribution of steam heat through the building.

So if you have these orifices and they are being either replaced or they're defective and clogged. They're cheap. But you have to make sure that you're installing the correct orifice size in that particular area of the building, because you don't want to mix and match and then now you have no idea what's going on. It's hard to troubleshoot the heating imbalance. And so what's gonna happen is you'll go downstairs and, you can't have miss or Mr. on the top floor freeze. So you crank up the pressure at the boiler to try to compensate for the lack of even heat. And now your carbon footprint goes up and your heating bill goes up at exponentially. 

Carol Ott: And just remind me again, does every radiator have an orifice or only certain systems? 

Spencer Kraus: No. So certain systems, similar to the orifice systems, you have a vacuum system.

So you have a two pipe vacuum system that just has regular steam going through it. Some of 'em have vacuum systems where you have an adjustable radiator valve. The way the vacuum system works is it creates a vacuum in the line, negative energy.

So when the boiler push negative pressure and when the boiler kicks on and puts positive pressure in the line it fills the system a lot quicker. If you have your radiator valve similar to that orifice style that I was talking about, if you have your radiator valves, they have a little orifice in it that you can adjust to allow for the even distribution.

It's very similar to that type of systems. So there's different types of systems all throughout Manhattan. There are the two pipes steam system is the main common one. There's a lot of vacuum systems out there. That's a topic in and of itself when it comes to carbon footprints. If you replaced all your traps and you have a vacuum pump that fully functions,

and you're doing the proper maintenance to reduce your footprint, let's just say, you can run your boiler. You should be able to run your boiler at a pound and a half, two pounds of pressure. Sometimes we go under these smaller buildings and they, the trap hasn't been replaced.

It's broken open, or it's closed and you have uneven heat, and so you just go downstairs to make sure that the cold apartment has heat because the hot apartment, you can throttle down the radiator valve if it works. You're pumping up five, six pounds, you're doubling the expense and the energy.

It's a lot of savings and when it comes to it. 

It's hard to, it's hard to talk about the energy efficiency without the savings. And I don't like doing it because to me, there's a little bit of a political aspect of the carbon footprint reducing stuff in the buildings, but everyone on the full spectrum loves savings.

And I just think that as I said before, it's like a double-headed solution of just changing the traps 'cause it really just doesn't pay not to. One or two 10 traps out of 40 could, drive up your energy bill. It's insane. 

Carol Ott: Alright. I think there's a lesson in that sometimes it's the littler things that can help you save, the bigger amounts of money. Thank you very much. This has been really informative.