What is a Steam Trap?
Steam based heating systems are similar to hot water heating, but they’re not quite the same. In a hot water system, liquid water enters, circulates, and returns to the furnace. This is not the case for a steam system. In steam, hot steam leaves the furnace, and water returns. This may seem like a minor difference, but it has massive implications to system efficiency. The Science of States When steam cools down, it becomes liquid water and falls down to the bottom of the heating system. On the one hand, this means less plumbing needed to capture and reheat the water. On the other hand, it means we have mixed-temperature fluids in the same space. The condensed water will absorb heat and hinder the operation of the heating system. It’ll cool down the radiators and the steam itself. The big problem is that water takes a lot of energy to move from being liquid to being steam. It’s not a linear graph. When you heat the water, it’ll eventually rise to the boiling point, about 100 C at sea level, and then the temperature won’t actually increase. The molecules in the water will start to absorb the energy until it’s enough to breaks the hydrogen bonds between them and form steam. As you can see in the chart, we continue to add energy into the system, and between states, the temperature rises, then we hit a limit. When its time […]