The field of steam heating would seem to be limitless—in one public building it required recently 480,000 dollars to meet the expenditures in this single line. As an example of warming on an extensive scale may be taken a large office in New York, of which the following are the particulars:
| Total number of rooms, including halls and vaults. | 286 | |
| Total area of floor surface. | sq. ft. | 137,370 |
| Total volume of rooms. | cub. ft. | 1,923,590 |
A second example is furnished by the State Lunatic Asylum at Indianapolis:
| Length of frontage of building, more than. | 2,000 lin. ft. | |||
| Total volume of rooms. | 2,574,084 cub. ft. | |||
| Warming Apparatus | indirect radiating surface | 23,296 | ||
| Direct | 10,804 | |||
| Total | 34,100 sq. ft. | |||
| Boilers | Grate area | 180 sq. ft. | ||
| Heating surface | 5,863 sq. ft. | |||
The “overhead” system of heating with steam pipes has several advantages. 1. The pipes are entirely out of the way 2. They do not become covered with odds and ends of unused materials. 3. If they leak the drip fixes the exact location of place needed to be repaired. 4. The room occupied overhead cannot be well otherwise utilized, hence in shops the system has proved efficient.
But for offices or store rooms the overhead system is not approved of owing to the heat beating down upon the occupants and causing headache.
When overhead heating pipes are used, they should not be hung too near the ceiling. If the room be a high one, it is better to hang them below, rather than above, the level of the belts running across the room, and they should not be less than three or four feet from the wall.
