Foaming boiler water

[Emfinger]

It seems the water in my boiler is foaming. Is there something I can add to the water to stop this?
Thank you
Tom

[FLSTEAM]

Foaming is likely the result of oil in the boiler. If this is a new boiler it will clear up after a couple of fire ups.

John B

[cbrew]

I have used heavy LSB and lots of blow downs to clean new boilers, it took a couple complete fire ups and blow downs to get a foam free boiler.

[Rwilliams]

Avoid using too much oil on a hand pump or an axle pump.

[tsph6500]

Add a few slices of raw potato or sweet potato. Fire up, as usual, and the potato simply disappears.

This is a very old remedy as told to me by Steve Bratina, and it WORKS! I had been chasing a water gauge issue for 1/2 the summer, changing input and output locations, added a water column etc, etc. Nope. Sweet potato cured it in one run. It's been good ever since.

Avoid any oil contamination of your boiler or feedwater supply (tender or tanks).

[Emfinger]

A 45 year old boiler.

[cbrew]

A 45 year old boiler.

looks like you may have run bad water,, how is the locomotive fired?

[Emfinger]

Oil

I'm sure all of the water up here is bad. I do use a conditioner of sorts...turns the water blue. The water has high calcium and all sorts of other crap.
My plan was to have my whole house water system processed one way or another. Then deal with the foaming. However the water treatment issue has become a project. So I need to address the foaming with this water.

[cbrew]

Oil

I'm sure all of the water up here is bad. I do use a conditioner of sorts...turns the water blue. The water has high calcium and all sorts of other crap.
My plan was to have my whole house water system processed one way or another. Then deal with the foaming. However the water treatment issue has become a project. So I need to address the foaming with this water.

with your tender, is it possible to get fuel oil in the water tank? that will cause a foaming issue in short order

[Pontiacguy1]

I used to go run at the C&IG regularly back in the 90's and early 2000's. Back then there were a lot of steamers running down there, and the water in central Texas is pretty darn hard. A lot of people are in the habit of leaving the water in the boiler overnight if they were going to fire up and run the next day. Well down there, if you didn't blow down every night, that thing would start foaming and would start blowing foam out of the stack. Looked like bird crap dropped all over your locomotive when it would do that, too. The water was getting so hard that it would foam. It tended to do bad things to leaking valves and such too. They would turn really white and get all crudded up. Lots of stuff got crudded up pretty badly.

Sounds to me like you've got an extremely hard water problem. You didn't say what type or size of locomotive this was... If it was small scale, I would suggest that you go get several gallons of distilled (NOT De-Ionized) water, drain and refill everything with that, and see if the problem goes away. If it's a bigger locomotive, go see if you can get some water from someone who has a softener or other purification system, and do the same thing. A few 5-gallon buckets should be enough for the test on a small to medium sized 1 1/2" scale locomotive.

[Emfinger]

OK, oil fired, but no oil gets into the boiler. It's a 1.5/6 scale so I'm going to try the distilled water test...
Thank you
Tom

[Emfinger]

Add a few slices of raw potato or sweet potato. Fire up, as usual, and the potato simply disappears.

This is a very old remedy as told to me by Steve Bratina, and it WORKS! I had been chasing a water gauge issue for 1/2 the summer, changing input and output locations, added a water column etc, etc. Nope. Sweet potato cured it in one run. It's been good ever since.

Avoid any oil contamination of your boiler or feedwater supply (tender or tanks).

Interesting, where do I put the Sweet potato?
Thank you
Tom