Gas and Oil Home Heating Furnaces - Draining a Weil-McLain boiler

Hi folks,
We have a Weil-McLain oil fired boiler with a domestic hot water coil. This unit is used to heat the house via base board hearters.

I noticed there seems to be a hose hook up on the lower right hand side of the unit, very close to the floor. Our house is fed by well water, and before I had a sediment filter put in, (shortly after we bought the house about 2 years ago), there was an issue with sand getting into faucets.

Would it be a good idea to drain or some how try to flush out the boiler water? I'm thinking that there could be sand in the system due to the well. The boiler is about 10-15 years old according to the techs who have been to the house to service it.

The water in the boiler and baseboards is part of a closed loop. Don't drain it. If you have problems with the hot water coil, you can backflush it or whatever you want to. It is not part of the closed loop. The 2 fittings you see on the front of the boiler for the hot water coil are each end of the coil. It is immersed in the boiler water but not part of it. Got that? If not, post again and we'll clarify.

Thanks for the reply. Do you think there's much chance of sand or sediment being caught or built up in the heating end of the system?

No. The possibility of that is about 0. There is a strainer in the automatic feed valve and nothing would get through that. If it did get in through a valve that may bypass the automatic feed, it will just harmlessly lay inside the bottom of your boiler. There is plenty of space for sediment inside that boiler and you don't need to be concerned with it. (Unless someone shoveled the sand in.) The water moves very slowly through the boiler in terms of velocity so once the sediment is in there, it will settle out and never pose a problem. Where you may have a problem would be in the hot water circuit. It could foul up a tempering valve or a flow restrictor if you have either of them.

Ahh, ok. Thank again for the advice.

How hard is it to flush the domestic coil? How does one tell if it needs to be done?