P
pfjw@aol.com
Guest
Ten years in service as of April 1. Makes our hot water, so operates year-round. Not one single glitch all these 10 years, but the service manual 'suggests' a firebox cleaning every five years or so. So, I purchased the kit ($59) and the cleaning tool ($29) and decided that this would be a good bit of PM to do while my new hip heals as I can do it sitting down.
Kroil is wonderful stuff. From reading on-line, it seems that these beast are notorious for seizing nuts and stripping studs. Given that, starting Saturday afternoon, I treated all the nuts and screws lightly, once again this morning. nothing seized or stripped, everything came off clean.
The old gaskets and heat-washers were pretty much done. The cover plate needed a bit of cleaning, I replaced the spark ignitor (included), cleaned the heat-exchanger - got about 1/3 cup of grit - and cleaned the site-glass. Checked the inhibitor levels (acceptable) cleaned the fire-cone, and put everything back together. Torqued the nuts per the sequence, fired it up, and off it went. Total time invested: about 2 hours.
I promise not to let it go 10 years, again, but this unit did not seem worse for the wear despite all that time. Note that this unit heats (well) our entire house (4,500 s.f.), so no complaints.
Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA
Kroil is wonderful stuff. From reading on-line, it seems that these beast are notorious for seizing nuts and stripping studs. Given that, starting Saturday afternoon, I treated all the nuts and screws lightly, once again this morning. nothing seized or stripped, everything came off clean.
The old gaskets and heat-washers were pretty much done. The cover plate needed a bit of cleaning, I replaced the spark ignitor (included), cleaned the heat-exchanger - got about 1/3 cup of grit - and cleaned the site-glass. Checked the inhibitor levels (acceptable) cleaned the fire-cone, and put everything back together. Torqued the nuts per the sequence, fired it up, and off it went. Total time invested: about 2 hours.
I promise not to let it go 10 years, again, but this unit did not seem worse for the wear despite all that time. Note that this unit heats (well) our entire house (4,500 s.f.), so no complaints.
Peter Wieck
Melrose Park, PA