Last month, I wrote about refrigeration design engineering being a lost skill. This month, I’m going to discuss another lost engineering skill: steam systems. When I started out at an HVAC consulting engineering firm back in the 1960s, our services were primarily focused on hospital design engineering. Back then, steam system engineering was standard for those building applications.
In the 1960s, fuel oil was inexpensive, and, quite often, No. 6 oil required a steam heating coil in the underground fuel oil storage tanks to keep it fluid, as it would solidify without this heat. Hospital boiler operators often required a license to operate the high-pressure (125 psig) steam boilers that were also a standard application. The purpose of the high-pressure steam was to serve the steam sterilizers and central sterile equipment washers that preferred 80 psig, while the building’s heating systems were low-pressure (15 psig) steam and, for the most part, used steam to hot water shell-in-tube heat exchangers.