Foreign Material in Casing of BCW Pump

Eureka! A dark matter concentrator!

The condensate return pipework rotting from the inside out.

It sounds to me like the bearings on your pump are toast. Or are the dark items preventing the pump from starting?

The scale the chemical cleaning knocked off the insides of the boiler and it's piping. Does the feed pump not have some type of filter(suction strainer) on it? During the chemical cleaning wasn't some type of filter system in place to catch all the scale it would dislodge? Some of those cleaners are made to oxidize the steel surface in to magnetite a a black oxide of steel. Which retards the formation of rust. Sort of like the chemicals used in bluing a gun for rust protection.

Thanks for all the comments.

Well, now that you've got us wondering......................could you come back and let us know what you find?????

One of the reasons we get involved with these questions, is because, we too would like to know the answer.

Thanks

I'm going to have to go with Ozzyb on this one. From my experience, it sounds like the "good" form of rust from your boilers. You want the black kind, which is what you're describing.

A large build up enough to prevent starting a pump shouldn't happen though. My bet is that the purge rate on the pumps was too low post cleaning. I'd put my money on inadequate flush rates on the pumps. The "flushing" likely just moved it from the boiler and deposited it all in the pumps instead of flushing it out.

The short answer to your question is, the source of the iron is the surface of the boiler.