The short of the story is that I get a call from my mother last night that her house is cold and the boiler isn't working. She was away for a few days. I go over and try to troubleshoot. The thermostats were calling for heat, the pumps were coming on, the burner was not. I pull the cover off to inspect and found the inside of the boiler to be covered in black soot. I didn't do anything to it. She had already had a a heating guy coming out this morning to do some minor fixes leaking pump flanges and maintenance on the boiler. The boiler is an HB Smith model g100-w-4 from 1989. It also has a standing pilot. The boiler guy pretty much had the same reaction I did to the soot. That it wasn't good. I wasn't there, but my mother told me what she knew. The boiler guy said something about having the burner cleaned to get it operational again. He said they don't do that sort of thing and even if you found someone, probably not worth the money. He suggested replacement. I don't know exactly what needs to be cleaned with the burner, but I am thinking that if a replacement can be had, that should do the trick. I know this isn't good specific information, but does anything have ideas as to what would be clogged on the burner to make it soot? Could a burner replacement possibly work?

Hi everyone, looking for some help here since I've contacted 3 professionals over the past 2.5 months without a response from any of them to come do some work on my electric hot water boiler. I have a Slant/Fin Monitron EH hot water boiler system with a 3-zone system. In December I had someone come look at it because it was constantly bleeding water from the relief valve (filling a 5 gallon bucket every 2-3 days or less if it was colder). He looked at it, and determined that it was installed improperly and needed a change in set-up. He drained my expansion tank which was full of water, and the dripping has since stopped. A new issue arose however, where it basically sounds like my house is a raging river. I've compared my pictures to the diagram and can't seem to determine the problem, but I've included some pictures. I have noticed that I don't seem to have a "diaphragm compression tank and fill valve" as per the installation diagram, and it instead looks like the water is piped directly into the system. I'm not having any issues with the zones or the producing heat (other then being inefficient) but just the fact that there is a lot of air getting into the system somehow. I've checked the expansion tank which is situated above the boiler itself and it is always hot (as if it's pumping excess hot water into the expansion/overfill tank rather then the system). Any help would be appreciated, and if you need more pictures let me know. expansion tank above the boiler [ATTACH]47291[/ATTACH] Temp/Pressure gauge when on [ATTACH]47295[/ATTACH] circulator heading into the bottom of the system [ATTACH]47292[/ATTACH] Three zone set up, literally just hanging out in the middle of this room occupying a fair amount of space. [ATTACH]47294[/ATTACH] [ATTACH]47297[/ATTACH] Apparently it won't upload the picture of the inflow, but you can see it at the right side of the picture of the monitron itself. The bottom pipe heading up leads to the expansion tank, the middle out to the rest of the system, and the top is the inflow from the city water.