At the 2023 American Boiler Manufacturers Association (ABMA) Manufacturers Conference in Oak Brook, Illinois, Aaron Zoeller, Director of Sales at Siemens Combustion Controls Inc. gave the crowd a clear take-home message.

“The way we live today, we need boilers, we need steam,” Zoeller said after quoting a colleague who termed the phrase “you can’t make chicken nuggets without steam.”

Technology from air fryers to ovens cook organic matter and produce steam as a byproduct, and while boilers are built to produce it much more effectively, efficiency is not the only priority of boiler system design.

“At a basic level, converting stored chemical energy to thermal energy is pretty easy. We’ve been doing that, more or less, pretty much since the dawn of time,” Zoeller said. “But doing it well can be quite a bit more difficult.”

With other priorities like safety and emissions reductions, boiler systems are not solely optimized for the conversion of chemical energy to thermal energy. That’s why there are so many members of ABMA that don’t manufacture boiler components, instead focusing on improving the other components of a steam or hot water plant, Zoeller added.

“If you're in California, emissions compliance might be your number two most important thing. It might be ahead of reliability,” he said, adding “low maintenance” is another priority that can take the back seat in that kind of regulatory climate. “If you're in Ohio, you might care a lot more about reliability than emissions.”

Zoeller concluded his talk by saying “conditions will change a little bit. But generally speaking, these are all what we're going for. We want to optimize these conditions when we put a boiler room system together.”