Help needed – Firing up my grandads steam boiler

[Paul KempParticipant @paulkemp46892]

Bob,

Lagging the steam pipe won’t do any harm but it’s unlikely to provide much practical benefit either. You need a good thickness of lagging to make a significant difference to the heat flow, you can’t scale nature. To get a significant benefit the thickness of insulation required would be vastly disproportional to the pipe size. I imagine the objection to your comment was the inference lagging is compulsory, for this application it might be nice to wind some “string” round the pipes but it’s not going to make any noticeable difference to the performance or greatly increase the efficiency. It’s an optional nice to have, not a must.

Best regards,

Paul.

[Martin Johnson 1Participant @martinjohnson1]

Paul beat me to it. There was a recent article on the maths of insulating small pipes by Mike Tilby in ME. It proves what Paul describes.

I hope in amongst all this chatter the OP has had a great time steaming Grandad's handiwork.

Martin

Edited By Martin Johnson 1 on 22/09/2023 13:03:57

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