I just found out boiler tubes can shrink over time and nobody warned me

I was reading through some old union newsletters last week, the kind that pile up in the break room, and I stumbled on a fact that really surprised me. Apparently, fire tubes in a boiler can actually shrink in diameter by a few thousandths of an inch after years of heat cycling. I mean, I knew metal expands and contracts, but I never thought about it permanently changing like that. The article from 2019 said it's common in older boilers with over 15 years of service, especially if they had hard water scaling. I went and checked one of our units that's been acting finicky, and sure enough, a few tubes were tight when I tried to drop a brush through. Has anyone else run into this shrinkage issue, or did I just miss the memo in training?

3 comments

3 Comments

jakef661d ago

Never heard that one before, thanks for the heads up.

thea1431d ago

My cousin tried that once and ended up accidentally gluing his phone to his hand for two hours.

tessa_hill861d ago

...you're telling me boiler tubes can just shrink after years of running? Like they literally get smaller in diameter and nobody thought to mention that in any of my training? I've been around boilers for almost a decade now and I swear I would have remembered that fact, mostly because it sounds like the kind of nightmare problem that keeps me up at night. The hard water scaling part really gets me too, because we've had some issues with that at our plant and I bet that's why our older unit has been giving us grief lately. I'm honestly a little mad at my supervisor for not warning me about this sooner, you know? That's the kind of thing that could really mess up a routine cleaning job if you're not expecting it.