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Heating and cooling for South Buffalo houses
Singles, doubles and converted flats. Steam and hot-water heating, cooling added to buildings that never had it, and extract that actually terminates outside.
No heat
Diagnosed from the cheap end. This is the order we work in, and it is deliberate — the entries at the top fail most and cost least.
Power and controls
The breaker, the emergency switch at the head of the basement stairs, the switch on the appliance itself, and the thermostat with its batteries. A real share of first-cold-night calls end here and we say so rather than finding something else.
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 automatic feeder, or nobody checking the glass. Topping it up without asking that is how boilers get wrecked.
Circulators and zone valves
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 — and in a double it is the single most common call we get.
Ignition and flame sensing
Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch, and the condensate trap on a condensing appliance. Most genuine faults live here and most of them are inexpensive.
Gas valve and board
Checked 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 and flue
Inspected on every no-heat call whatever the fault turned out to be. A cracked 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 a double, tell the other flat as well — it is one basement and one flue, and it is not only your half of the house.
Ring us afterwards. Finding out why it happened and putting it right is ours.
Radiators, and the rooms that never behave
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 — a vent is a small part and pitch is a shim and twenty minutes. On hot water it is a zone valve, a circulator, a closed valve or an air lock.
Upstairs too warm, downstairs too cold
In a two-storey house or a double this is physics before it is a fault. Heat rises, the upper floor sits over a heated space, and the lower one loses to the basement.
Balancing is the cheap answer — vents and pitch on steam, lockshield valves on hot water — and it is skipped far more often than it is done. Zoning is the real answer and it depends on how the pipework was run.
Hammering and hissing
Banging on steam is water sitting where steam needs to travel, usually from a radiator or pipe that has lost its pitch. It is hard on the system and it is fixable.
Hissing from a radiator vent while the system fills is normal and we would rather tell you that than take the call.
Cooling, ventilation and replacement
Into a house with no ducts
Ductless heads with a small line set to an outdoor unit, a small-duct system through closets and chases, or window and through-wall units where those are genuinely right. The outdoor unit goes up off the ground — at grade it spends part of every winter partly buried, and a heat pump has to shed defrost water rather than stand in it.
Fans that go outside
A bathroom fan discharging into an attic or a soffit is a mould problem being built one shower at a time. It is one of the most common faults we find and one of the cheapest to put right.
Sized from the building, not the old plate
A steam boiler is sized from the connected radiation — the actual radiators — not from the rating of the one being removed. Getting that wrong is the commonest reason a new boiler performs worse than the old one, and it is why the survey takes longer than people expect.
Which changes with the appliance
Going to a high-efficiency appliance changes the venting completely, and on a chimney shared with a water heater it changes that too. It belongs in the quote rather than in a phone call on the day.