Page 22 - Boiler Operator’s Handbook

Operating Wisely 7

National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) Codes measurements, and I always wonder how much they’re
NFPA—30—Flammable and Combustible Liquids Code being taken for. I also wonder how much they’ve wasted
NFPA—54—National Fuel Gas Code with no concern for the cost.
NFPA—58—Liquefied Petroleum Gas Code Any boiler large enough to warrant a boiler op-
NFPA—70—National Electrical Code
erator in attendance burns hundreds if not thousands
NFPA—85—Boiler and Combustion Systems Hazards
of dollars each day in fuel. To operate a plant without
Code (applies to boilers over 12.5 million Btuh in-
measuring its performance is only slightly dumber than
put)
————————— handing the attendant twenty dollars on your way to
a Requires inspection by an authorized inspector so you don’t get coffee when you know there may not be room in the
have to know all these rules. tank for that much. When I pursue the concept of mea-
b These haven’t been revised in years and contain some recom-
surements with boiler operators I frequently discover
mendations that are simply wrong.
c Requires inspection by an authorized inspector so you don’t they don’t understand measurements or they have a
have to know all these rules wrong impression of them. To ensure there is no confu-
sion, let’s discuss measurements and how to take them.
That’s volumes of codes and rules and it’s impos- First there are two types of measures, measures of
sible for you to learn them. They are typically revised quantity and measures of a rate. There’s about 100 miles
every three years so you would be out of date before you between Baltimore and Philadelphia, that’s a quantity.
finished reading them all. It’s not important to know ev- If you were to drive from one to the other in two hours,
erything, only that they’re there for you to refer to. Flip- you would average fifty miles per hour, that’s a rate.
ping through them at a library that has them or checking Rates and time determine quantities and vice versa. If
them out on the Internet will allow you to catch what you’re burning 7-1/2 gpm of oil you’ll drain that full
applies to you. CSD-1 or NFPA-85, whichever applies 8,000-gallon oil tank in less than 19 hours. Quantities are
to your boilers, are must reads. Some of those rules are fixed amounts and rates are quantity per unit of time.
referred to in this book. The most important element in describing a quan-
Sections VI and VII of the ASME Code are good tity or rate is the units. Unit comes from the Latin “uno”
reads. Regrettably they haven’t kept up to the pace of meaning one. Units are defined by a standard. We talk
modernization. The rest of the ASME Codes apply to about our height in feet and inches using those units
construction, not operation. You’ll never know them without thinking of their origin. A foot two centuries
well but you have to be aware that they exist. ago was defined as the length of the king’s foot. Since
As I said earlier, many rules were produced as the there were several kings in several different countries
result of accidents. That is likely true in your plant. A there was always a little variation in actual measure-
problem today is many rules are lost to history because ment. I have to assume the king’s mathematician who
they aren’t passed along with the reason for them fully came up with inches had to have six fingers on each
explained. I’ll push the many concepts of documenta- hand; why else would they have divided the foot by
tion in a chapter dedicated to it but it bears mentioning twelve to get inches?
here. Keep a record of the rules. If there isn’t one, de- Today we accept a foot as determined by a ruler,
velop it. The life you safe will more than likely be yours. yardstick, or tape measure all of which are based on a
piece of metal maintained by the National Bureau of
Standards. That piece of metal is defined as the standard
MEASUREMENTS for that measure having a length of precisely one foot.
They also have a chunk of metal that is the standard for
If you pulled into a gas station, shouted “fill-er-up” one pound. As you proceed through this book you’ll
on your way to get a cup of coffee then returned to have encounter units that are based on the property of natu-
the attendant ask you for twenty bucks and the pump ral things. The meter, for example, is defined as one ten
was reset you would think you’d been had, wouldn’t millionth of the distance along the surface of the earth
you? You might even quibble, “How do I know you put from the equator to one of the poles. Regrettably that’s
twenty dollars worth in it?” Why is it that we quibble a bogus value because a few years ago we discovered
over ten dollars and think nothing about the amount of the earth is slightly pear shaped so the distance from the
fuel our plant burns every day? I’m not saying yours is equator to the pole depends on which pole you’re mea-
one of them but I’ve been in so many plants where they suring to. Many units have a standard that is a property
don’t even read the fuel meter, let alone record any other of water; we’ll be discussing those as they come up.