I decided to blog about the conversion we're doing from heating our roughly 2000 square feet house in Acton using oil to natural gas. I've learned a lot, found many things (mostly National Grid) kind of frustrating, and hope others can benefit from my experiences.
Background:
The house is about 50 years old, and so is the forced baseboard hotwater boiler. Its a huge, hulking York boiler that would probably go another 50 years. I believe the oil burner was replaced at least 16 years ago (we've been in the house for 16 years). It used to have an in-tank domestic hot water coil, but I've heard that the harder water in Acton (although we have *great* water) tends to wipe out these in-tank DHW coils. When we moved in, there was a 40 gallon electric hotwater heater. I got tired of paying for all those KWh, so we put in a SuperStor 40 gallon tank a few years back.
Our chimney has 3 flues, the 4" square one was for the oil burner. About 6 years ago, the draft on the oil flue wasn't working as well, and the chimney folks said that flue had had it. We payed many thousands for a (supposedly) stainless chimney liner that was pulled down a larger flue that would have been for the firebox in the basement (which we'll never use because the oil tank was in front of it). Well, last heating season, the draft was even worse, there was soot in the basement, occasional puffbacks, and we had a chimney guy out early in the spring only to discover the liner was completely decayed. I've learned that oil fumes are very corrosive, and even stainless (if that's what the liner really was - we paid for stainless but I have my doubts) is not sufficient. Now, this liner did have a 3-4 foot horizontal run to get from one side of the chimney to the other before going vertical - I suspect the water vapor condensed in the rise, collected the acid from the exhaust, and pooled in that horizontal section, hastening its demise.
So, we were looking at several thousand dollars *again* to fix the chimney. I investigated several do-it-yourself liners, and believe that would have been a viable solution, but the good ones (AL type - for Alleghaney Ludlum - a special alloy that is the best possible at resisting the corrosion from the exhaust) are not cheap. The boiler is old - probably would go a lot longer, but you never know; and, it was about 80% efficient (that's from memory) and was *way* oversized, so I was wasting oil just to bring the thing up to temperature before it cycled off.
Ok - that's the background... More soon.
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