We are now in the middle of a snowy winter.
The highway departments are spreading salt and brine by the truckload. It's great that we can buzz along the highways at a mile a minute or more. Many highway departments are using the Magnesium Chloride liquid brine at the first hint of freezing weather. It has twice as much chloride as rock salt.

However...this summer, when you have your steamer fired-up, remember that the salt of winter is now in your groundwater and is concentrating in your boiler.

Why be concerned ? Iron Chloride...it looks like oxygen pitting damage. It looks like rust, only it progresses rapidly, especially on the hottest parts of a boiler, the firebox, hot end of tubes, and the hot ends of staybolts. When you see heavy ' rust ' that is flaking and cracking in a thick layer or leaving deep pits...it just may be chloride attack rather than plain oxygen rust.

Another clue, if brass valve parts are showing green corrosion at packing nuts and drip edges, that is Copper Chloride.

How to know for sure ? A simple test is available from any of a half-dozen or more suppliers. The thing to ask for is a Chloride Test, using silver nitrate. It's easy, just sample the water and follow the 3 step instructions. If you have over 100 parts per million plus the symptoms described above, you need to take some protective actions, or you are headed for some serious boiler repairs.

Action possibilities;

1. Find a better water source.

2. Pre-treat your water to remove chlorides, you can combine this with acid, hardness and iron removal, as needed.

3. Use a water treatment that both ' ties up ' the chlorides so it isn't so concentrated and available to cause damage, and the treatment forms a protective film on the boiler metal.

Anybody just throwing water in the boiler without knowing what is in it and treating accordingly might benefit from the wake-up call of an expensive new set of tubes.

Testing is follow-the-recipe easy - results should provide you with the information you need to choose and implement the right treatment program based on your specific situation at that point in time, which will be in a constant state of change, so frequent testing is SOP, with treatment alterations as necessary. If you are running captive, you will get to know broadly the seasonal variation of your water characteristics after a couple years of operation and can stock the testing and treatment supplies you will most likely need when they are cheap.

So, do you know what's in your fuel and in your lubrication?

dave

What is your water source? Are you just tapping from ground water pumping?

Remember that ground earth has a way of filtering and can filter off salts, but the steam roads already knew of this and their water supplies were steam friendly.

A happy steam engine is a water treated engine. Aside from that improper water can give you foamy steam, not good.

Know all about salinety testing from when I ran the Evaps on board the USS Koelsch back in the 70's. We were one of the few class of ships"Garcia class frigates" that had the Evaps. in the fire room. I loved running those things when we had nice cold sea water to work with.
The distiliation plant was kind of like running a locomotive as they each had their own tricks & quirks.

Dave H.

The earth and man-made media filters can filter out Suspended Solids, i.e. mud and fine turbidity, that is about as good as they get. With Salts, we're talking about Dissolved Solids. A different animal, these have an electrical ionic charge. For example, common salt, Sodium Chloride, breaks up, or disassociates in water. As an ion, it is physically smaller than suspended matter, and cannot be physically filtered out by a media filter.

What it takes, is a Reverse Osmosis membrane. These come in sizes ranging from a 25 Gallon Per Day household drinking water unit up to Municipally sized installations large enough to supply San Diego from the Pacific Ocean. Some excursion operators in the Northeast are looking at installing RO for boiler water.