The night shift boiler in that old paper mill near Baton Rouge went from orange to black in 3 hours flat

Was running a startup on a big recovery boiler down at the old International Paper mill outside Baton Rouge last spring. The firebox looked like a normal bright orange glow when I came on at 6 PM, but by 9 PM it was dark as pitch inside from all the soot buildup. Turns out the soot blowers had been offline for two shifts and nobody flagged it. You ever walk into a black firebox like that or am I the only one who nearly tripped over their own boots?

2 comments

2 Comments

noahs8219d ago

You mention soot buildup, but a black firebox in 3 hours usually means a fuel problem, not just dirty blowers.

troyjackson18d ago

Yeah, "fuel problem" is the right way to look at it. That soot was probably masking a bad air-to-fuel ratio that was dumping unburned carbon into the firebox. When the soot blowers are down, you lose the visual cue from the burner flame color, so you don't catch the fuel issue until the whole thing is black.