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Heating and cooling for Albany houses
Rowhouses, brownstones, two- and three-families, apartments in converted buildings, and the suburban stock beyond. Steam and hot water, and cooling added to buildings that never had it.
Steam and hot water
The heating most of this city still runs on, and the heating most contractors would rather replace than understand.
Almost never the boiler
On one-pipe steam it is usually the air vent on that radiator, or the pitch of the radiator or its pipe. A vent is a small part. Pitch is a shim and twenty minutes.
On hot water it is a zone valve, a circulator, a closed valve or an air lock. All ordinary repairs.
Either way the boiler is proving it works everywhere else in the building, which is worth remembering when somebody quotes you a new one.
Water where steam needs to travel
Banging on a steam system is condensate sitting in a pipe or a radiator that has lost its pitch, so steam hits it at speed. It is hard on the system and it is fixable.
Hissing is different. A radiator vent hissing while the system fills is doing exactly what it is for. That one is not a fault, and we would rather tell you so than take the call.
Why it dropped matters more than topping it up
A steam boiler with a low water level shuts itself down by design. The question is always why — a leak, a failed automatic feeder, or nobody checking the glass. Filling it without asking that is how boilers get wrecked.
Sized from the radiators, not the old boiler
A steam boiler is sized to the connected radiation in the building — the actual radiators — not to the rating of the boiler being removed and not to floor area. Getting that wrong is the commonest reason a new boiler performs worse than the old one.
It also means the survey takes longer than you might expect, and that is the part worth paying for.
Gas, or a carbon monoxide alarm
Do not ring a contractor first. Get everybody out of the building and, from outside, call 911 and your gas utility’s emergency line. They arrive faster than any contractor, they do not charge you for a false alarm, and making the property safe is their job. In a multi-family building tell the landlord or managing agent as well, because it is not only your apartment.
Ring us afterwards. Finding out why it happened and putting it right is ours.
Adding cooling to a building with no ducts
Three routes, and the building chooses between them more than you do.
A head on the wall in each room that needs it, with a small line set back to an outdoor unit. Efficient, quiet, and the least destructive to plasterwork — but every head is visible, and the line sets have to get from the rooms to the outdoor unit through a building that was not designed for them.
Small flexible ducts run through closets, chases and floor voids to discreet outlets. Far less visible in a room with cornices and original detail, more work to install, and it depends entirely on there being routes through the building.
Sometimes genuinely the right answer, particularly in a single room or a rental. They cost more to run and they block a window, and in a historic district the street-facing ones can be a question in themselves. We will say when they are the sensible choice.
Living in a building you do not own all of
A large part of the residential work here is in apartments and converted buildings, and that changes what is even possible.
What is inside your walls
The radiator, its vent and its valve. The thermostat. A ductless head and the routing inside your own unit. These are yours to fix and they cover a surprising share of the complaints we get.
What is not
The boiler, the risers, the chimney, the roof and anything on the outside of the building. If a whole line of apartments is cold, that is the building’s equipment and we will say so rather than selling you a visit — and we will put what we found in writing if that helps you with the managing agent.
What your lease or your proprietary lease actually requires is a question for you and your attorney, not for us.