Boston Plumbing and Heating Blog

Cooler weather is fast approaching and smart home owners are making sure that their furnaces are ready to perform properly and efficiently. Make sure you home is warm this winter and that your heating bills are as low as they can be.

Do you know if your furnace or boiler is working optimally and that you are not wasting energy? This will ensure that you are as warm as you can be this winter. Did you know that almost half of all heating equipment in our homes does not perform to its optimal standards and efficiency? This is mostly due to incorrect installation. And if you have an older heating system built before more modern efficiency standards, you could be spending more than you need to on heating your home this winter.

If your boiler or furnace needs to be replaced have it installed properly by a professional, certified technician.

Beyond that, there are some other steps to make your home warmer and more efficient:

Have your heating filters cleaned and check them every couple of weeks. Change them at least twice in the season, or as directed by the manufacturer.

Check and maintain insulation and add weather stripping and caulk around windows and doors. This can also improve a home’s insulation.

Turn down the thermostat or install a programmable thermostat.

Clean around the furnace or boiler. Don’t keep chemicals or cleaning products near a heater, and don’t store anything next to it that could impede ventilation.

Keep the vents and returns free of obstructions. Don’t lay carpet over vents, place furniture over or in front of them, or obstruct the flow of air.

Dry air feels cooler than moist air, so install a humidifier. A simple humidifier may make the home feel five degrees warmer than a home with dry air.

Have your heating system, furnace or boiler serviced regularly for optimal performance. Greater Boston Plumbing & Heating can service and repair all of your forced hot water boiler or steam boiler system issues. By making sure your heating system is operating properly you can maintain a warm, comfortable home while keeping heating costs down.

For more information, contact Greater Boston Plumbing & Heating.

As we breathe each day, we exchanges between 10,000 and 70,000 liters of air every 24 hours. And yet as compared with the concern for quality of food and water, air quality is comparatively overlooked. 

The average person spends 90 percent of their time inside and unfortunately, indoor air is far more polluted than outdoor air. According to the EPA, indoor air contains 2 to 5 times more contaminants and sometimes as much as 100 times more. 

Indoor air pollution is one of the most serious environmental threats to your health, and no agency can regulate it. However, properly cleaned and maintained heating systems and cooling systems will have a significant positive impact on the quality of your home's air.  

Indoor air pollution has been linked to both short-term and long-term health problems. The EPA warns that the following conditions can be caused or exacerbated by poor indoor air quality:

• Asthma, allergies, and other respiratory problems
• Headaches
• Eye and skin irritations,
• Sore throat, colds and flu
• Memory loss, dizziness, fatigue and depression

There are other health problems that can be caused from highly toxic airborne particles and these show up years later and include heart disease, respiratory disease, and even cancer.

Those particularly vulnerable to indoor pollutants include infants, the elderly, and people who already suffer with heart and lung diseases, asthma, or compromised immune systems. Unfortunately, these are also the people who typically spend the most time indoors.

You can't always stop pollutants from coming in, but in some cases, you can prevent pollution from actually happening. Contact Greater Boston Plumbing to learn more about how your indoor air quality can be improved.

If you live near water, or if your home was built in or around the ‘50’s, your home may be built on a slab rather than on a foundation. Homes built on a slab are just that, a rectangle of concrete is poured and the home is built atop it.  Often, people want to add an additional bathroom to homes built on slabs, but they don’t know if they can.

When homes are built on a slab, the plumbing is laid before the concrete slab is poured. You can add plumbing after the fact, but it is labor intensive. This is similar to adding a bathroom to an existing basement.

Greater Boston Plumbing and Heating with work with the homeowner on the layout of the bathroom. All fixtures, sink, toilet, shower, will be laid out in their final location. We will then mark where the drains will be located on the floor related to all of the fixtures that require plumbing.

There are two options for running plumbing lines.

1. The concrete slab can be dug out into trenches and the lines can be run through them. We then pour concrete into the trench to level the slab, and the new floor is covered with ceramic tile. This gives the nicest appearance of the two options.
2. A plumbing system can be installed above the slab. The drain lines will be exposed but most of the other plumbing lines will be hidden in the new bathroom walls. An electric pump is used for the drains, and is visible.

For more information on installing a new bathroom on a slab, contact Greater Boston Plumbing and Heating.

In Worcester and Boston home owners are considering how to better heat and cool their homes in order to save on energy costs. Homeowners have been seeing and hearing a lot about “heat pumps” but many don’t know what they are. Heat pumps give you an energy-efficient alternative to furnaces and air conditioners. In many cases a heat pump is preferred to separate heating and cooling systems.

Heat pumps use less energy to move heat from a cool space to a warm space, making the cool space cooler and the warm space warmer. During the winter, heat pumps draw heat from the cooler external air and bring it inside while moving the cooler inside air, out; in the summer, heat pumps move heat from inside your home to the outdoors.  They move heat they don’t generate heat, so they can give up to 4 times the amount of energy they consume. They transfer heat, they don’t burn fuel to create heat, and this makes them very efficient.

If you heat your home with electricity, a heat pump can cut down on the amount of electricity you use for heating by up to 30% to 40%. High-efficiency heat pumps dehumidify your home better than most central AC units. This saves you money in the summer.

There are also gas-fired heat pumps, called absorption heat pumps. These use heat as their energy source, so they can be fueled by natural gas, propane, solar-heated water, or geothermal-heated water.

For homes without ducts, air-source heat pumps are also available in a ductless version called a mini-split heat pump. For homes that have "non-ducted" heating systems this is a good energy efficient add on.

One of the biggest advantages of a heat pump over a standard HVAC system is that you don’t need to install separate systems to for heating and cooling.

For more information on heat pumps, contact Greater Boston Plumbing and Heating.

Homeowners spend a large percentage of money on heating and cooling. The only way to cut these costs is to make the heating and cooling system, or HVAC, more energy efficient. This is  not as hard as you may think.

First, compare your utility bills to friends’ homes of similar size. How do your energy bills compare? Do you use more or less energy? After you figure that out, you can begin to make energy saving changes.

Check the air filter in your heating and cooling system. A dirty air filter slows air flow. This forces the HVAC system to work harder and waste more energy. You should change the air filter at least every three months.

AC service and maintenance is imperative to keep your system running efficiently and effectively. If your central air system is working to hard it will waste energy. Greater Boston Plumbing and Heating can  handle all of your service, maintenance and upgrade needs on your cooling system. A well-maintained heating and cooling systems run more efficiently therefore wasting less energy.

A programmable thermostat saves lots of energy. By programming your thermostat to energy-efficient temperatures you can save about $180 a year, according to Energy Star.

Contact Greater Boston Plumbing and Heating to schedule your heating and cooling system maintenance.