A day as a Boilermaker
Boilermakers get called when a boiler, a tank or a pressure vessel has to come apart and go back together without leaking. Most of the work happens during outages, when a plant shuts down and pays a crew to fix years of wear in a few hard weeks. This page follows one field day inside a coal-fired boiler, because that's where a lot of apprentices learn the trade.
One shift on a boiler outage
Badge in, safety meeting, permits
You park in the contractor lot, walk through the plant gate and head to the trailer for the morning toolbox talk. The general foreman runs through yesterday's near miss, the day's lifts and who's on hole watch. Your crew's confined space permit gets signed, the air monitor gets bump-tested, and lockout tags on the boiler get checked against the list. Nobody climbs in until that paperwork matches.
Inside the firebox
You climb the scaffold into the furnace and clip your lanyard to the tie-off point. Today's job is replacing a section of waterwall tube that thinned out from erosion. The inspector marked the bad tubes in paint during the last shutdown. You and your partner lay out the cut lines, then take them out with a torch and a grinder, keeping the ends square so the new piece can be fit and bevelled.
The lift that doesn't fit
The new panel comes up on a chain fall and a come-along through a hole the laborers opened in the casing. It's supposed to slide right in. It doesn't, because the old tubes have sagged and the gap is off. The foreman calls a stop. You spend the next hour heating, pulling and shimming until the fit-up is tight enough for the welder, and the schedule on the whiteboard slips by half a shift.
Welds, then waiting on X-ray
The certified tube welder on your crew runs the root and hot pass while you keep the fire watch and move the lights and the welding leads. Every joint on a pressure part gets checked, so the welds get marked for radiography. The X-ray crew shoots at night when the area is cleared, which means you won't know until tomorrow whether any of today's joints need to be cut out and redone.
Clean up and sign off
You pull your tools out of the firebox, coil the leads and sweep slag off the scaffold deck. The steward reminds the crew that the outage is going to long days starting Monday. You fill out your time card, turn in your permit and drive back to a motel room near the plant, because this job is several hours from home and the per diem covers the room.
Field hand or shop hand
The day above is the field side of the trade. Field boilermakers follow the work: power plants, refineries, paper mills, chemical plants and steel mills, mostly during planned shutdowns. You dispatch out of a union hiring hall in a lot of regions, sign the out-of-work list when a job ends, and wait for the next call. Busy seasons run hard. Slow stretches mean no paycheck, so saving during outage season isn't optional.
Shop boilermakers stay put. You work in a fabrication shop building pressure vessels, heat exchangers, tanks and boiler parts from drawings, on a normal shift with a normal commute. The work is cleaner and steadier, and you'll read far more blueprints, run the plate rolls and the press brake, and fit up shells and heads on the floor. Plenty of people start in the field for the money and move to a shop once they want to sleep in their own bed.
Whichever side you land on, the job is heavy. You'll work at height, in heat, in cramped spaces lined with ash and dust, wearing a respirator. Knees and shoulders take a beating over a career, and you should go in knowing that.
Where boilermakers come from
A union apprenticeship
This is the main road into field work. You apply through the local lodge of the International Brotherhood of Boilermakers, take an aptitude test and an interview, and get indentured as an apprentice. You earn while you learn, rotating through outages with journeymen and going to classroom sessions on rigging, blueprint reading and welding. It takes several years, and you come out a journeyman with a card that carries weight on any big job.
Welding school, then a helper job
If you already weld, a fabrication shop or a non-union industrial contractor may hire you as a helper or fitter's helper. You'll learn fit-up, torch work and rigging on the job. Pass a weld test on pipe or tube and your value jumps, because tube welders are the people outages are short on.
Crossing over from another trade
Ironworkers, pipefitters, millwrights and military hull technicians often move over, because the rigging, welding and blueprint skills carry across. Veterans can sometimes enter an apprenticeship with credit for prior experience. Ask the local what they'll count before you assume you're starting from the bottom.
What Boilermaker postings ask for
Hiring the most
- Freeport McMoRan Inc..3
- Ameren2
- Black & Veatch Corporation2
- City of New York1
- SpaceX1
Remote
0% of openings are fully remote.
Questions people ask
Do boilermakers need a license?
It depends on the state and the work. Some states license people who install or repair boilers and pressure vessels, and some cities add their own rules on top. Welding on pressure parts also calls for weld procedure qualifications under the ASME code, which your employer handles. Check with your state's boiler safety office or licensing board before you assume either way.
Is being a boilermaker the same as being a welder?
No, though welding is a big part of it. A boilermaker also cuts, fits, rigs, reads blueprints and assembles whole vessels. Some journeymen hardly weld at all and run rigging or fit-up. The ones who can pass a tube or pipe weld test get called first when outages staff up.
How much do boilermakers travel?
Field boilermakers travel a lot, sometimes for weeks at a stretch, because outages happen wherever the plants are. Many live out of motels or campers during busy season and collect per diem. Shop boilermakers mostly don't travel. If being home matters to you, look at fabrication shops or a plant's in-house maintenance crew.
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