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Posted by Brad on October 16, 2006 at 10:39:09:
Hi all.
I have a Trianco Heatmaker II (circa 1991, pre-Teledyne) HW-M2-130N (130BTU), runs on natural gas and heats water both for hot water radiators and for my faucets. It's working fine, after recent repairs including replacing the coil, integrated control, expansion tank and bleeder. It's installed inside a very small closet, just big enough to fit it and its tangle of pipes. (I'm in a cramped NYC apartment.) The boiler closet inside dimensions are 29" x 41 1/2", and the boiler itself is 21" x 18". That leaves 8" behind the boiler and 13 1/2" next to it for the pipes.
I'm soon getting my apartment remodeled, and although I'd like to keep the boiler since my plumber tells me it's got years left in it, I figure this is an opportune time to enlarge the closet to plan for eventual replacement. I'd like not to enlarge it too much, but I'm not sure that any current boiler would be able to fit in it.
As I understand it there are boilers currently for sale which come close to the compactness of the Heatmaker for the same BTU range, but they're all slightly bigger. For example, my neighbor has a boiler with a hot water tank stacked above the boiler.
Whatever replacement I eventually get needs to heat water both for radiator heat and for hot water. Also, the exhaust pipe currently exhausts directly through the outside wall (meaning its only about 3 feet long) and the new boiler needs to have the same setup as I can't run an exhaust pipe up to the roof of my building.
Right now I'm really just trying to decide if/how much I should enlarge the closet around the Trianco Heatmaker.
Does anyone know of or could recommend compact boilers that would fit this situation? The Weil-McClain Ultra was one that somebody recommended on another forum. Can anyone think of any others that would fit well into a small space?
Thanks,
Brad