Greetings, This is my first post on this forum and I hope this is the correct section to post this in. My heating system is as follows: Forced hot water oil heat system with baseboard radiators Utica Star Fire boiler Beckett AF oil burner Super Store, off line water tank oil tank (very old) _______________________ My question(s) are two fold: 1. Is it wise an possible for a homeowner to do the yearly cleaning on the oil burner, boiler, and oil tank or hir in a professional? I'm pretty handy with tools, as I do most of my car/ house repairs and eager to learn this now. What is envolved with learning this? 2. During this spring and summer, we turn the heating system on for showers, and some hot water, but during the rest of the day we shut the system off, basically to save on oil. Is this a wise to do this? 3. Now that the cold weather is here, I'm concerned that we might have some slug buildup in the oil filter. The reason I say this is this morning, I flipped the emergency switch on and the heating system did not start. I went down stairs and the furnance temp was zero degrees. I turned the system off and there was enough hot water for a shower. 15 minutes later I turned it back on and it fired up again. next I removed the cap on the oil tank and stuck a pole inside, to see how much oil there is, about 1/8 of a tank, but I could hear all the grit at the bottm of the tank when the pole hit it. Today we had 150 gal. of oil delivered and I'm going back to check on it after work. The last time we had a cleaning was last 9/05. DOes this sound like the oil filter might be clogged. I looked at it and it seems easy to replace is this something that I could handle? Thanks Frank

Hello, I have been searching the forum and just wanted to ask a few specific questions. Let me first give you the specs of my system if I may: Weil-McLain CG boiler with honeywell zone valves (5), grundfos pumps?, spirovent(don't know what this is), something inside the boiler is set to 170, something that says Honeywell AM series Sparcomix is set to 12 over 24, the pressure is just under 20 psi. The problem that I am having is that the baseboards (rather the pipes in them) are making a lot of noise! I hear the light pings of the fins (which I read on this board is normal), but I also hear loud pings, like someone hitting the pipes with a small hammer, I hear pounding like the pipes litting something and when the pipes are cooling down, in one area there is always a sound as if someone had hit the pipes and they rattle for a bit. Most of the sounds occur when the pipes are warming up, sometimes when they are cooling down. Hopefully someone can tell me if this is normal or is there some problem or do I have air in there? ALso, I read here that I can buy some covers to put over where the fins rest so that they can slide without making sound, what is this called and where can I buy it?! Finally, where the pipes come in through the floors and such, should I caulk or insulate the pipes here to reduce noise? Any help would be greatly appreciated. One last thing, over the summer when I bought that place, I removed the old baseboard covers and the pipes just hung around in the air for a few months until I put the new covers on. When I reinstalled the covers I noticed that not all of the pipes sat nicely on thier holders, some rested with a lot of pressure on the holders while others even were suspended in the air. I do not remember what they looked like before I removed the old covers. Sorry for the long post!