- Home
- Homes
Heating and cooling for Buffalo houses
Doubles, singles and converted flats across the city and the inner suburbs. Steam and hot-water heating, cooling added to buildings that never had it, and ductwork measured rather than guessed at.
No heat
Diagnosed from the cheap end. This is the order we work in, and it is deliberate.
Power and controls
Breaker, the emergency switch at the head of the basement stairs, the switch on the appliance, and the thermostat with its batteries. A real share of first-cold-night calls end here and we say so.
Water level on steam
A steam boiler with a low level shuts itself down by design. The question is always why it dropped — a leak, a failed feeder, or nobody checking the glass. Topping it up without asking is how boilers get wrecked.
Circulators and zones
On hot water, a zone 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.
Ignition and sensing
Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch, and the condensate trap on a condensing appliance. Most genuine faults live here and most are inexpensive.
Gas valve and board
Last, because they fail least and cost most. If we get there you see the reading that proves it before anything is ordered.
Heat exchanger
Inspected on every no-heat call whatever the fault was. A cracked one ends the visit — shut off and tagged, no repair attempted.
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 double or a converted flat tell the landlord or the other occupants too, because it is not only your unit.
Ring us afterwards. Finding out why it happened and putting it right is ours.
Old radiators, added cooling
One cold radiator
On one-pipe steam it is usually the air vent on that radiator, or the pitch of the radiator or its pipe. On hot water it is a zone valve, a circulator, a closed valve or an air lock. Either way the boiler is proving it works everywhere else in the house.
Cooling a house with no ducts
Ductless heads with a small line set to an outdoor unit, a small-duct system run through closets and chases, or window and through-wall units where those are genuinely right. The building chooses between them more than you do.
Raise the outdoor unit off the ground. In this city a condenser at grade spends part of every winter partly buried, and a heat pump has to shed defrost water rather than stand in it and freeze. That is not an upgrade here, it is the correct installation.
The room that never keeps up
Where ductwork exists, it is nearly always a branch added during a remodel, a crushed flexible run, a damper closed years ago, or a return far too small. We measure static pressure and the airflow at that register, which turns an argument into two numbers.
An oversized replacement makes it slightly worse, and that is what usually gets sold.
Doubles, flats and shared systems
A large share of this housing stock has more than one household in it, and that changes what is even possible.
Yours
The radiator, its vent and its valve. The thermostat. A ductless head and the routing inside your own unit. These cover a surprising share of the complaints we get and they are all fixable at your end.
Not yours
The boiler, the risers, the chimney, the roof, and anything on the outside of the building. If a whole flat is cold while the other is warm, that is worth measuring before anybody pays for equipment — and we will put what we find in writing so it can be handed to whoever owns the building.
What a lease requires is a question for you and your attorney, not for us.