Rudolph Plumbing & Heating Inc

11/06/2022

Rudolph Plumbing & Heating is back & available for service now that I've healed up & have some cool new scars to show for it!

Boiler & furnace service, water heaters & more.

06/03/2022

Service from Rudolph Plumbing & Heating will be unavailable for a while due to an unfortunate health setback. I'll look forward to getting back to regular service for all my clientele as soon as I am able.

10/28/2020

A collection of various boiler installations performed by Rudolph Plumbing & Heating.

10/28/2020

An IBC SL 20-115 serving basement slab heat, a stainless steel indirect water heater, and a hydronic unit heater in the garage. The system runs 50% propylene glycol to protect the unit heater from freezing should there ever be a component failure.

03/13/2020

If your business or workplace has bathroom sink faucets with handles, consider calling us to upgrade to the superior hygiene offered by hands-free faucets. Aside from preventing the cross-contamination of having to touch handles after having already washed, they also conserve water. At least one brand has the impressive feature of recharging its battery from a tiny, built-in hydro-generator!

12/05/2019

Here I’m featuring yet another job that required a pipe freeze, though a much larger one compared to my previous post. This is a different hotel client that required a 3” diameter valve to be replaced on their main water service. Due to not wanting to drain all 9 stories of piping above the water meter room to accomplish the repair, I opted to freeze the 4” diameter galvanized water main just above the junction of the two parallel backflow preventers. This was chosen both to reduce the down-time that would be required to drain the water lines in the entire 8-story building but also the time to refill it and vent out air from the water lines throughout the building, it allowed the repair to be performed both more quickly and more safely.

The freeze was started at 12:30 am to minimize disruption to the hotels guests, and the water supply was restored by 2:45 am. A 3” flanged gate valve was installed on one of the two parallel 3” dual check valve assembly backflow preventers due to the previous valve not fully closing.

11/18/2019

Here’s an example of how to accomplish a water line repair on a building that would really prefer to not shut their water off, in this case a regular hotel client of Rudolph Plumbing. The valves serving their commercial laundry machines were leaking very badly and were impeding a repair to one of the washers. I had to undertake my repair first to allow the commercial laundry repair tech to perform theirs. Note the use of shock-arrestors, these prevent pressure spikes & jarring movement of the water lines when the washing machines electric valves close rapidly.

I traced the water lines through the ceiling and determined that there were not any valves to isolate the hot & cold supply lines from the building mains. Shutting off the water to a hotel with 82 guest rooms is best left avoided so I opted to utilize my pipe freezing kit, which allows me to freeze an ice plug in the water lines. The kit has collars to fit pipe up to 2” diameter and uses liquid CO2 (carbon dioxide) to form dry ice around the pipe which freezes the water within. I have another kit that uses a different type of collar that can freeze pipes up 6” diameter, though the largest pipe diameter I’ve frozen to date is 4” (also at a hotel, though easily a few hundred more rooms by comparison).

In the middle photo with the water lines cut, note that there is live water pressure above the black plastic collars that the coiled plastic CO2 lines are connected to.

Previous freeze jobs included replacing the isolation valves to the baseboard heaters in a downtown office tower; every time that landlord had a vacancy on one floor they would take the opportunity to replace the existing 40+ year old valves, about 14 of them per floor, all work on night shift due to having to turn off the 21-story buildings heating boilers and circulators. Another freeze job of note was the previous Canadian Blood Services building just down the block from Lougheed House on 13th Ave S.W. That building could not have the water shut off whatsoever due to the fact that their refrigeration equipment was water-cooled. Turning off their water would ruin their stored blood (no stress freezing that one!! )

07/04/2019

Here is an excellent example of what not to do with a domestic hot water recirculation system and what I did to right a chain of previous wrongs. This is a domestic hot water recirculation line in a Calgary location of a major North American hotel chain that burst entirely in two, the leaking water damaged electronic controls on 3 major pieces of heating equipment (both commercial water heaters and the boiler that serves the pool and hot tub). It was nice to fix it properly so that they won't suffer property damage or downtime in the future. Its a shame that the previous repair contractor passed themselves off as being competent when they clearly had no business working on such things.

Stage 1 was isolating the leak upon arrival. Stage 2 was restoring the hot water for the entire hotel, stage 3 was replacing the poorly MacGuyvered sections of tubing and the circulator. All this while the hotel was at full occupancy. I was able to isolate & drain each water heater individually for the tie-in of the new recirc return connections, by doing this one at a time I maintained a constant hot water supply to the hotel. Performing that in the mid afternoon was ideal as it was the off-peak time for the guests hot water needs. Some might note redundant valves at the connections to the tanks, those were used so that I could restore the hot water as soon as possible and minimize down-time.

02/26/2019

Here is a commercial boiler installation that Rudolph Plumbing & Heating performed in a hotel. The demolition of the old boiler was done in warmer weather and the new system was online and providing for the buildings needs in time for heating season. Measures were taken to allow the domestic hot water to remain online while the new indirect water heater was being installed. This bank of IBC boilers heats the building through its baseboard radiators as well as heating two make-up air fan-coils through a heat exchanger. Being as they're drawing in outside air, the fan coils needed to be isolated by a heat exchanger in order to be freeze-protected through the use of a propylene glycol/water solution. The system also heats the hotels significant domestic hot water needs through a 500 litre (132 US Gallon) stainless steel indirect water heater.

IBC boilers can be installed in factory multiplex racks that allow flexibility in matching a buildings heating requirements, they also provide for redundancy and priority opt-out for heat loads such as domestic hot water. The boilers can sequence & modulate down to as low as 10% of their maximum firing rate of a single boiler to match low heat requirements, or they can simultaneously ramp up to their maximum firing rate as required. In multiplex installations the boilers are configured such that one boiler is the master that controls all of the others and it will sequence the operation all of the boilers so that they all get exercised equally. Boilers other than the master control boiler can be piped to provide for domestic hot water opt-out, when a call for domestic water occurs the boiler(s) will shut off their circulator to the main heat demand and turn on their circulator to the domestic water heater.

01/03/2019

I've worked with Kitec before and generally found that most issues stemmed from leaking O-rings at the fittings, Calgary's water quality did not seem to affect the brass fittings, at least in my experience. I thought a heads-up would be in order for anyone who might have this product line installed in their home or business.

Between Kitec and polybutylene tubing its nice that Pex has been so reliable (excepting certain lead-free fittings that experienced de-zincification, the tubing itself has been great for decades).

Canadians with Kitec plumbing may be eligible for compensation in class action

11/29/2017

Today was a lucky day! I had recieved a call regarding a boiler that was not heating the clients home and rearranged my schedule to prioritize the call. I was pulling up out front of the clients home when he called and noted that he had the issue solved and that it was just the thermostat batteries that were the culprit. I noted I had already arrived and that should probably take a peek while I was there. What I discovered in their home was a boiler that had been firing in a dangerous condition, and because of the danger that I found I was very relieved that the call was not cancelled before I got to site.

As I opened the door to the small mechanical room I could immediately recognize the odor of incomplete combustion; anyone who has taken a shop class or done welding and knows the smell of the bright red acetylene flame before the oxygen is turned on will also know the smell to which I'm referring. That the smell was not going out the chimney was also a major red flag. I turned off the boiler and proceeded with its disassembly and service. First was to clean the unit of all soot accumulation (the symptom) and then to clean and adjust the burners to provide better combustion and no yellow flame which was the source of the soot in the first place (the disease).

What was so worrisome about this boiler was the extent of the soot accumulation and that its exhaust was escaping the chimney, but also that the homeowner did not have a carbon monoxide detector as it surely would have alerted them to this problem. The mechanical room where the boiler is located is immediately adjacent the basement rumpus room where the couples 2 1/2 year old child plays which could have had tragic consequences. CO is slightly lighter than air but its proximity to the childs play area was alarming. This older late 1950's / early 1960's boiler does not have some of the safety controls that a newer unit would have (blocked vent safety switch or a flame rollout switch) so it was still firing despite its unsafe condition. A bit of luck was on these clients side today as had they called me 10 minutes earlier I would likely have simply accepted the cancellation and went on with my previously scheduled work. Thankfully for them fate had other plans. This boiler, if left unserviced, would have likely resulted in a tragedy that could have killed the entire family; it might have taken a year to get to that point, but it was running on fixed rails to that conclusion. I'm generally not one for hyperbole when it comes to selling my services but this was the real deal today, something extremely bad was prevented.

This call resulted in my purchasing a carbon monoxide alarm for my service van inventory. I emplored the clients to get one and will be following up with them to ensure that they have done so, or I can drop them off my new one and get myself another one for inventory.

Symptoms of carbon monoxide poisoning can include headaches, dizziness, confusion, nausea/vomiting, blurry vision, shortness of breath and weakness. If you notice such symptoms exit the structure immediately. Warn anyone else in the building to leave and ventilate the structure by opening doors. Contact your local fire department. There may be an obvious source of the CO that can be removed or shut off, etc but it might also be a mystery to those not familiar with the many sources that can generate it.

03/25/2017

Good article here, but I sadly wasn't consulted on the photo selection :P

New water heater technology and incentives are making tankless systems feasible for more Calgarians here’s nothing better than being in plenty of hot water