Showerthought: spent 11 hours chasing a leak on a 60 inch mud drum and it was a 2 minute fix | Boilermakers - Freelance Forum - The Community for Independent Professionals
Showerthought: spent 11 hours chasing a leak on a 60 inch mud drum and it was a 2 minute fix
So we got called out to a plant near Gary, Indiana because the mud drum on a 60 inch boiler kept showing low water level on the gauge glass. I figured it was a plugged equalizing line, easy job, maybe an hour tops. Three days and 11 hours of torch work later we had cut out and re-piped both the water column and the lower equalizer, only to find a chunk of scale the size of a quarter wedged in the bottom cross tee. Pulled it out with a piece of wire, put everything back together, and the level sat perfect in under 5 minutes. My foreman just shook his head and said we should have rodded the tee first before touching a single pipe. I still think about that quarter sized rock every time I get a weird level reading. Has anyone else got a trick for checking the bottom tee without pulling the whole column?