Boilers are a type of space-heating equipment consisting of a vessel or tank where heat produced from the combustion of such fuels as natural gas, fuel oil, or coal is used to generate hot water or steam. Many buildings have their own boilers, while other buildings have steam or hot water piped in from a central plant. Commercial boilers are manufactured for high- or low-pressure applications.
Most medium-to-large facilities use boilers to generate hot water or steam for space heating, domestic water heating, food preparation, and industrial processes.
For boilers to run at peak efficiency, operators must attend to boiler staging, water chemistry, pumping and boiler controls, boiler and pipe insulation, fuel-air mixtures, burn-to-load ratio, and stack temperatures.
Note recent trends in boilers systems, which include installing multiple small boilers units, decentralizing systems, and installing direct digital control systems, including temperature reset strategies. Because these systems capture the latent heat of vaporization from combustion water vapor, flue-gas temperatures are low enough to vent the exhaust through polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipes; PVC resists the corrosive action of flue-gas condensate.
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