Spent two more days last week working on the system and am almost done now. I piped the diesel line, filled it with Propolene glycol, and tested it. The only thing left is that the boiler is missing the burner, which is hopefully coming in airfreight from Europe very soon. and one custom adapter to attach the hot air hose to an existing chase that will supply the pilot house. Filling the system with glycol and testing it took me way more time than it should have. I don't have the burner yet, so I can't run the boiler, but I can heat the system with the engine heat exchanger. I realized once I started it up, that I had misunderstood the direction of flow on my engine coolant lines, and had them piped to the heat exchanger wrong. I tried to use bar clamps squishing the coolant hoses when I changed them, to keep them from leaking all over, and it did not work out that well. I got it done, but made a big coolant mess in the process.
I also had a couple small Leaks on a couple of unions that I had not tightened quite enough. Easy fix on those, just had to crank them tighter.
The problem I wasted a ton of time on, about 6 hours over 2 days, was that I could not get the air to clear out of one of my loops. It was getting a little flow, but not enough, and had huge air bubbles visibly trapped that were not helping. The pump was just not strong enough to push them out. I drained it a couple times, and added a couple more highpoint vents, which didn't really help. After wasting a ton of time fighting it, I peeked around the back of the boiler and looked at the back of the pump, which is pretty buried in my installation, and realized it was a variable speed pump with a little switch I could crank up. When I turned the pump up, it immediately cleared all the air and worked perfectly.
