orogenic
New Member
Hi all, new poster here.
I live in an apartment on the 3rd floor of a 3 floor *maybe* 1930s building in Queens NY. I have a steam pipe that terminates near the ceiling of my bathroom and has a straight air vent at the top. When the system is going full blast there's a constant stream of hot steam coming out the vent making a lot of noise, making the whole bathroom steamy (luckily I can open a window), water collecting on the ceiling... so I figured I'd try to do something about it.
As I understand, in theory, radiator vents should close completely when the system is hot and up to normal pressure, but in practice leaks from these kinds of vents are pretty common especially for lower quality or old parts. I think there could be some pressure difference between the radiator's vent and this pipe's vent, but I wouldn't expect the difference to be so large as to account for the fact that my radiator's vent can almost completely seal, whereas this pipe's vent seems to not stop any steam at all. I suspect my vent is pretty old. It has markings reading FLAIR No. 53. I tried to find some information about this part from Google. All I found was a PDF through Wayback Machine because flairproducts.net (I believe this was the manufacturer's website) doesn't work anymore.
There is only one No. 53 model number listed, for a 1/8". I was able to remove my vent and take some measurements and what I found caused me some uncertainty.
Hopefully you can see from my free-hand phone camera measurements, the thread-to-thread this is *almost* 3/8", and interior diameter is *not quite* 1/4". I think this looks more like a 1/4" than a 1/8". While I'm not familiar with tolerances for these measurements, this seems too far off to be a 1/8".
I was hoping to replace this straight air vent with a Hoffman vent as I have read those are considered high quality, and the price suggests so as well! ($60 for a 1/4" straight air vent!)
If anyone has any thoughts about this part, I'd appreciate it. I'll try asking some local plumbing and hardware people as well.
I live in an apartment on the 3rd floor of a 3 floor *maybe* 1930s building in Queens NY. I have a steam pipe that terminates near the ceiling of my bathroom and has a straight air vent at the top. When the system is going full blast there's a constant stream of hot steam coming out the vent making a lot of noise, making the whole bathroom steamy (luckily I can open a window), water collecting on the ceiling... so I figured I'd try to do something about it.
As I understand, in theory, radiator vents should close completely when the system is hot and up to normal pressure, but in practice leaks from these kinds of vents are pretty common especially for lower quality or old parts. I think there could be some pressure difference between the radiator's vent and this pipe's vent, but I wouldn't expect the difference to be so large as to account for the fact that my radiator's vent can almost completely seal, whereas this pipe's vent seems to not stop any steam at all. I suspect my vent is pretty old. It has markings reading FLAIR No. 53. I tried to find some information about this part from Google. All I found was a PDF through Wayback Machine because flairproducts.net (I believe this was the manufacturer's website) doesn't work anymore.
There is only one No. 53 model number listed, for a 1/8". I was able to remove my vent and take some measurements and what I found caused me some uncertainty.
Hopefully you can see from my free-hand phone camera measurements, the thread-to-thread this is *almost* 3/8", and interior diameter is *not quite* 1/4". I think this looks more like a 1/4" than a 1/8". While I'm not familiar with tolerances for these measurements, this seems too far off to be a 1/8".
I was hoping to replace this straight air vent with a Hoffman vent as I have read those are considered high quality, and the price suggests so as well! ($60 for a 1/4" straight air vent!)
If anyone has any thoughts about this part, I'd appreciate it. I'll try asking some local plumbing and hardware people as well.
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