Consumer Reviews of Heat Transfer Products boilers

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Date created: 2012-10-31 Name: Homer
Location: Nevada

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"Blower Racket"
J. C. Pernicka--Bellvue, Colorado---Yes, I can tell you from 40 years of experience: Installation is a big deal, especially with the new high efficiency boilers. If you have a Dungs gas valve look at the swirl plate and make sure it is not disintegrating, especially since you have replaced blowers before. It is a plastic plate between the gas valve and the blower that swirls the air and gas. If you have a Honeywell gas valve, make sure that you didn't suck something into the blower. Something may be unbalancing the impeller or the bearings maybe going. Lastly, you need to have a combustion analysis on the boiler. You may mistakenly believe that the blower is making the noise when it is "flashing" in the heat exchanger caused by the boiler pump not moving water through the hx fast enough. If so, clean the pump and or replace the cartridge. Munchkin is a good boiler and trouble free if installed correctly and maintained. (You do maintain the boiler and clean the combustion chamber?)--read the posts--

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Date created: 2012-10-09 Name: Showerless JOE
Location: Amherst, MA

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"Banging in Boiler"
Finally! - Some people who know these systems....I Bought an 80m in 2007, and have pretty good luck with it so far. I have a 2 zone system with dhw heating as well. Recently, the system has started banging shortly after the dhw cycle starts. My plumber said that the water is "flashing" in the boiler. The temperature shoots up very quickly and the burner modulates down and will eventlally shut off. Now, I'm not a hvac tech, but it seems that this would happen because the boiler is not getting enough water flow. Sure enough, I read on one post about how a bad pump could cause this. My question was I was wondering if anything else would cause it. Are there any tests that will narrow down the problem - thanks!!!

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Date created: 2012-10-09 Name: Homer
Location: Nevada

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"No Code--No Lite"
Diana--Cheyenne W---Well, first read the posts. Sorry that you had so much trouble. You have a gas reversion problem because of faulty exhaust and intake installation. When did you do a major cleaning and tune-up? No Code--No Lite: No code tells me that the major components are ok. No lite tells me the following: No gas(propane tank empty or valve off?), no spark or hot surface ignitor not functioning, no combustion air. Those are the three things necessary for combustion. Check to see if you have gas. Check to see if you have spark or that the hot surface ignitor is bright red. Is the spark cable grounding out? Is the spark probe cracked and grounding out? This is what I think it is. You have a plugged condensate drain and the moisture in the combustion chamber is grounding out the spark. But I think that you would still get a code. Keypad plugged into the control board? Hope this helps.

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Date created: 2012-05-10 Name: Sam H.
Location: Carbon, Alberta
Years owned: 6

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"Down But Not Out"
My Munchkin t80m has worked error free for 6 years. In Dec it start to show signs of problems. It started to occasionly pump warm water(not hot) and then clear up. It has had 3 f09's since then and cleared up on it's own. Monday May 6 it f09'd and shut down and won't heat water. I use the boiler for hat water and to heat the basement floor. I have a hi eff forced air furnace because we have winter's of -20 or more on a regular basis. I have read all the posts here and hope I have better luck with my repairs and maintenance. My situation is this. When I took possesion of my house the contractor told me not to touch the system and if it needed work to call the plumber. What a ditz. I did what he said and never did any maintenance or cleaning.(after reading here I think Im the ditz) So after 6 years here is what I have found so far. I inspected the install and have a few concerns. The boiler unit is wall mounted 5 ft off the floor. It does not look like it is tilted at all. I will put some blocking between the wall and the unit to get the tilt. How far out should I block it. 1in? 2In? I found the vacume relief valve was brittle and broken and leaking on the wall and floor. The stain is rust colored. I removed it and there was some condensate water but no alot. I took the cover off and the control display board is mounted inside the unit?? How can a person see an error code if it's in there. I want to mount outside the unit. There is a bit of white crystaline around the exhaust hose. The outside vents are mounted 12 to 16 indh's apart and level with each other. I removed the 2 probes and cleaned them up. Tried the reset a couple times and watched in the window and did not see anything. There was a white/grey coating on them. I am going to do a complete maintenance service today. I will change the probes and gaskets like is stated in these posts. I will clean up all the parts and hope I am still lucky and don't have much more damage. Any help or suggestions is greatly appreciated. It would seem that the problem with this Munchkin unit is just a lazy/uninformed maintenace guy(me) and maybe some install problems. Now to find the parts. The reason I gave a neutral rating is because I haven't done the work or found the parts yet, but 5 years without problems, go figure, I must have one of the good ones.

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Date created: 2012-04-18 Name: Homer
Location: Nevada
Years owned: 8

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"Here We Go Again !!!"
Chris--Sandwich, NH---Where do I start?--Oh! Read the posts! Lots of good info there. First, In 40 yrs in the business I have never come across an unreliable boiler and I have never told any customer that their boiler was unreliable whether it's a Slant Fin, Buderus, Viessmann, Triangle Tube, or Munchkin. Let me tell you, in my experience, there are a many, many, many dumb, dumb, dumb technicians out there. If a technician say that a boiler is unreliable, your question should be "Why is it unreliable?". You will probably hear a lot of stammering. a technician blames the boiler rather than admit to his own inexperience. The fact that you have re-occurring problems indicate that your technician never got to the source of your failures and just substituted parts. (Expensive for you and a good living for him). Chris look to the installation, there are hundreds of thousands of Munchkins properly installed out there that are problem free; look to the application, 2-199,000 btu boilers? Do you really need that much heat? Common practice in times past, when replacing and old boiler with a new one, the contractor would look at the BTUs of the old boiler and match the new one to the old one after all it worked before. We don't do that. We make a whole house heat loss calculation and match the boiler output to the heat loss of the building. This saves boiler costs and energy costs. I have covered cleaning in past posts, and I don't have problems with cleaning. ModCon (Modulating-Condensing) boiler need maintenance. They need to be installed correctly. It would be a shame to throw away 2-4 year old boilers when it may not be the boilers fault. Think about the chances that the 2 Munchkins that you bought were both lemons (astronomical). Good Luck! Look to the installation.

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Date created: 2012-03-11 Name: Homer
Location: Nevada
Years owned: 7

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"Potato-Potahto---Tomato-Tomahto"
Danny Collins- Groveland,MA---I don't know what growling and banging sound like. My idea may be different than yours (it's subjective). What did your boiler guy do in servicing? Did these noises occur after servicing and not before? It's keeping you up at nite? Absent any other symptoms, fault codes, loud noises in my observation, have come from moving parts.---1. Blower motor is failing (separation). This in my experience had been very loud and no fault codes,too. Is the sound coming from the exhaust outside the house?---2. Flashing in the hx because the pump is not pushing enough water through the hx this creates banging sound, One other thought, Is the burner tube securely attached by the four screws and not vibrating? Of course, there is the possibility, that somehow, a bear got into your boiler, I know there's a remote chance of that happening. Hope this helps.

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Date created: 2012-03-06 Name: Homer
Location: Nevada
Years owned: 7

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"M. Lottermoser--A Final Note!"
M. Lottermoser--Calgary, Alberta--Good advice from beltline HEATING--If you decide to take the advice (highly recommended), keep in mind that the combined (intake + exhaust) of straight pipe is 85'. Each fitting has a straight pipe equivalent that must be added to the straight pipe in your system and end up being not more than 85' total. If you are close to that figure, I would use a dwv (Drain Waste Vent) pvc 90 degree fitting rather than a sharp pvc 90 degree fitting as the resistance to flow is less in the dwv fitting. a pvc dwv 90 is not a true 90 degrees, it opens at 1/4" per foot and is a long sweep fitting (which means less resistance to flow). -----ALSO-----Your glyco in your system is nearing it life cycle at 7 years. You should have it tested and or think about replacement.---CLR Is ok, but I use Simple Green scale and lime remover as it's formula is like Rydlyme, which was recommended by htp.

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Date created: 2012-03-05 Name: Homer
Years owned: 7

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"GOOD JOB!"
M. Lottermoser--Calgary, Alberta---Good job--You're obviously talented. First: Don't change the post purge on your boiler. When the post purge occurs the boiler loop pump is not running so you are not circulating cold water into the heating system. The hx contains about 1 gallon of water, which is insignificant. It is more important to clear the combustion chamber of acidic moisture and gases. Second: It is always good to wear a dusk mask when handling the ceramic refractories. The washer and nut will compress the ceramic which is not a concern. Just tighten it enough to make sure that the nut is securely threaded on the post. Third: You need to replace the burner gasket and make sure that the burner tube is tightly secured by the four screws. Clean the mating surfaces to remove the old gasket material. Fourth: You do not need to replace the probes if they are in good shape, just clean them well. In earlier post I have said how I do it. When cleaning the hx I always remove the target refractory so as not to damage it. Do not use a brass brush to clean the hx, stainless steel or nylon only. Read these post on cleaning the hx. Fifth: Parts should be available well into the future as many of the parts that you may need are used on the newer models. Try KSCDirect.com for online parts. They are reasonably priced. If I were to stock parts, they would be--the burner gasket-refractories-water pressure switch--one water temperature sensor (in or out). The failure of the blower, gas valve depends on venting (gas reversion), see earlier posts, especially concentric venting. Lastly, if you live in an area with lighting, get a whole house surge protector and be sure and protect the boiler electronics with a computer grade (4200 joules) surge protector.

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Date created: 2012-02-28 Name: M. Lottermoser
Location: Calgary, Alberta
Years owned: 7

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"199M - First failure in 7 years"
199M with ssu-60 indirect water heater, two Heat Controller fan coils, glycol system 30%, concentric venting 8 feet above ground on 2 story wall. From reading all the previous posts, I seem to be extremely fortunate on two fronts. Proper installation and venting. No annual maintenance since it was installed 7 years ago (to my shame). The control card just failed, where the relays clicked on and off continuously in one second intervals. Replaced it with a 926 card but noticed the post purge of over a minute seems to cool the boiler output water by 10 F. from when the burner shuts off. Can the post purge be shortened ??? so as not to waste too much heat. The local distributor doesn't keep spare parts so it was going to take over 5 days to get the control card. Fortunately, the winter has been mild here and I was able to get one online from the US within 3 days. During those three days I cleaned the hx and unplugged the condensate drain. Fortunately the boiler was slightly tilted to the back to the drain so only the bottom third of the rear ceramic target wall was water damaged, dropped from the threaded stud but leaning against the rear boiler wall. The washer and nut was buried in the ceramic material. I replaced the rear ceramic target wall but am worried washer and nut will loosen off again. With annual maintenance, this may not be an issue. The drain was plugged solid with coffee ground type material a couple inches above the trap. It would slowly drip but was able to squeeze and tilt the trap downward where after 15 minutes of working it, the rinse water in the hx finally pushed the material out. Rinsed the hx with fresh water from a small pressure hose and was able to flush out all the solids. (7 years worth). It took a few sessions with CLR and nylon brush to clean the hx. But after two days it looks good as new. I cleaned the dust off the burner, cleaned the flame sense probe and ignitor probe. Noticed the burner gasket was slightly loose and will replace it shortly. Should I replace the probes as well, for peace of mind??? The outside sensor failed 5 years ago and was replaced. So in summary, I am very satisfied that the boiler worked fine without any annual maintenance for 7 years but I am very dissatisfied with lack of spare parts in a timely manner. Therefore, the neutral rating. Since the boiler has been manufacture discontinued in 2011, how long will spare parts be available?? Are any components being used in new boilers?? Any further suggestions on what spare parts I should buy and replace based on the 7 year track record?? What is the failure rate of burners, gas valves and blower motors after 7 years? Any other advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for all the previous posts. I will keep this boiler and properly maintain it. I would never have guessed that the installation and maintenance of these condensing boilers would be so critical. But that's progress, where the consumers have more due diligence to shoulder. Hopefully, that doesn't sound too bitter.

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Date created: 2012-02-04 Name: Homer
Location: Nevada
Years owned: 7

Satisfaction Rating:
Review:
"Come On Dear Readers--Read The Posts"
Gary Strandberg--Darby,MT---You have an installation problem (probably concentric venting). Change your post purge on your boiler to 100 sec. "Use the Force, look to the venting, Luke".-----Sheila--Milford, PA--- Why do you think that the condensate line is clogged? Your boiler is only 2 years. old. It depends on where the blockage is. Is it in the boiler? Sheila, this is not something people can do easily for themselves. It involves dismantling the boiler to get to the hx. In 2 years, I would be surprised if you had a blockage. (Any f09 or f10 error codes?) However, for the layman, in an emergency, I would take an ear syringe, the rubber bulb type that you buy at the drugstore, an squirt some warm water into the hx through the condensate drain connected to the rear of the boiler and then suck the water out. Don't over do it with the water, just repeat the process until it is cleared. then get a qualified boiler guy to clean it correctly. If the clog is on the drain line outside of the boiler just flush it with water under pressure. Sheila, download the Vision 1 manual and read it.---Those of us that have experience, training and are knowledgeable can only point you dear readers in a certain direction. It is really up to your boiler guy and you to get to the source of your problems and fix them. htp makes great products and you shouldn't be experiencing the problem that are repeatedly reported on this site. ps--i just read the posts from the beginning to the present, do the same.

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