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Apartments, two-families and houses in Yonkers
Steam and hot-water heating, gas boilers and furnaces, central air, ductless, and the window and through-wall units a lot of this housing stock still runs on.
No heat
Checked in the order that costs you least. The things at the top fail most often and cost the least to put right.
- Power, switches and the thermostat first
The breaker, the emergency switch at the head of the basement stairs, the switch on the boiler itself, and the thermostat with its batteries. A genuine share of first-cold-night calls end here, and we say so rather than finding something else to charge for.
- Water level and low-water cutoff on steam
A steam boiler with a low water level shuts itself down, and it is designed to. The question is why the level dropped — a leak, a failed automatic feeder, or somebody who stopped checking the glass. Topping it up without asking that is how boilers get wrecked.
- Circulators, zone valves and air on hot water
A zone that is cold while the others are warm is almost never the boiler. It is a circulator, a zone valve, a thermostat wire or an air lock, and those are ordinary repairs.
- Ignition, flame sensing and the gas train
Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch, and on a condensing appliance the condensate trap. Most genuine faults live here and most of them are not expensive.
- Heat exchanger and flue, on every visit
Inspected whatever the fault turned out to be. A failed heat exchanger ends the visit — the appliance is shut off and tagged, and no repair is attempted on it.
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 building safe is their job. In an apartment building, tell the super or the 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.
Living in a building you do not own all of
About half our residential work is in apartments, two-families and three-families, and that changes what is even possible.
- Your radiator is the coldest in the building
On a one-pipe steam system that is usually the air vent on that radiator or the pitch of the pipe, and both are fixable at your end. On hot water it is more often a balancing problem across the whole riser, which is not.
- The whole line of apartments is cold
Then it is the riser, the boiler or the controls, and that is the building’s equipment. We will tell you that plainly rather than selling you a visit — and if you want, we will put what we found in writing so you can hand it to the managing agent.
- You want to add air conditioning
What is possible depends on the building, not on the equipment. A ductless head needs a route for the line set and a place for the outdoor unit, and in a co-op or a rental both are permissions before they are jobs. We will say what is technically possible; the approval is between you and the building.
Cooling, ventilation and replacement
Central air and ductless
Installed, serviced and repaired. Charge measured against the conditions and the plate figure, not topped up on sight, and sized from a calculation rather than from what came out.
Window and through-wall units
Serviced where it is worth it and replaced where it is not. There is a whole page on this site about when a service call on one of these is money wasted.
Ventilation
Bathroom and kitchen extract that actually terminates outside. A fan discharging into a ceiling void or an attic is a mould problem being built one shower at a time.
- A quote that matches the rating on the old boiler
Usually means nobody did a calculation. Equipment installed before about 2000 was routinely oversized, and matching it repeats the mistake with a better warranty. A replacement quote from us is built from a room-by-room heat loss, the state of the distribution, the venting and the electrical supply — on one page, with model numbers on it.
- A quote with nothing about the chimney on it
Changing to a high-efficiency appliance changes the venting completely, and on a chimney shared with a water heater it changes that too. If it is not in the quote it will be a conversation on the day, and that is the worst possible time to have it.