Boilers and heating
One zone cold, or the whole house. Boiler replacement, heating repairs, and the pumps, valves and thermostats between the boiler and the rooms.
What it covers
The system that heats the house, from the burner in the basement to the last radiator on the top floor. Replacing a boiler that has reached the end, repairing one that has not, and the parts around it that often fail before the boiler does: the pumps, the zone valves, the safety valve, and the thermostats and controls that tie them together.
Most MetroWest houses heat with hot water pushed out to baseboard or radiators, split into zones. When one room is cold and the rest are fine, the fault is usually in that zone and not in the boiler. When nothing is warm, it often is the boiler. Both start with the same visit, and telling you which one you have is the first job.
Some plumbing outfits stop at the pipe and send the burner side to a heating contractor. Our team handles the burner, the controls and the piping together, because a boiler that is piped well and running badly is still a boiler that is not doing its job. The team is certified with Viessmann, Buderus and Navien, three of the boiler makers most often going into houses here.
It also covers indirect hot water tanks, the ones that make domestic hot water off the boiler rather than from their own burner. If your hot water and your heat come from the same appliance, this page and water heaters are both relevant.
This page is heating in general, and any boiler: cast iron, steel, atmospheric or modern. The wall hung condensing and combi generation is a different machine to work on rather than a different job, so it has its own page at high efficiency boilers and tankless. If yours hangs on the wall, vents through plastic pipe and shows a fault code, start there.
What the job involves
- Finding out what is actually wrong. A hot boiler and a cold room usually means a pump, a valve, trapped air or a thermostat. That gets sorted out before anybody talks about a new boiler.
- Sizing a replacement to the house. What the house needs now, not what was there before. A boiler that is too big for the house switches on and off constantly, wears out sooner and costs more to run.
- Out with the old unit. The system shut down and drained, and the old boiler removed and taken away.
- Installing the new one. Set where it can be serviced, and connected so the heat gets where it needs to go.
- Fuel, venting and burner. The fuel connection made and tested, the vent set up the way the boiler calls for, and the burner checked running.
- Zones and thermostats. Each zone wired and set so it heats on its own.
- Fill, bleed and test. Filled, the air bled out, then run and checked zone by zone until each one heats.
When you need it
- No heat, or heat in some rooms and not others
- One zone cold while the rest of the house is warm
- Banging, knocking or a kettle noise when the boiler runs
- Pressure dropping and the system needing topping up again
- Water or rust staining around the base of the boiler
- Radiators that need bleeding every few weeks
- The boiler firing and cutting out in short bursts
- A relief valve that discharges
- Fuel use climbing with no change in the weather or the thermostat
- An appliance old enough that parts are getting hard to find
Why it matters
Heating failure in this climate is not only a comfort problem. A house that loses heat in January can lose pipes as well, and a frozen line that splits does its damage when it thaws, usually into a ceiling or a wall. The cost of the repair is rarely the boiler.
A system that keeps losing pressure is losing water somewhere, and every time it is topped up it takes on fresh, oxygenated water. That is what quietly corrodes a system from the inside, boiler outward, so the refilling is not the fix. It is the symptom worth chasing.
Noise is information. A kettle sound often means scale inside the boiler or water moving through it too slowly. A boiler that keeps switching on and off is often fighting its own controls or is bigger than the house needs. Neither stays a noise forever.
And the houses here earn their reputation. The pre-war streets around Natick center and South Natick, then the post-war waves that followed across MetroWest, mean plenty of systems on their second or third boiler with piping altered by more than one owner along the way. A new boiler connected to that piping without anybody looking at the piping is a new boiler with an old problem.
How Connerney handles it
- Licensed and insured. Licensed and insured in Massachusetts.
- Diagnosis before replacement. A cold zone and a dead boiler are different jobs. You get told which one you have, and why.
- Boiler and piping together. The burner side is not handed to a second contractor, and the system is run and checked heating before our team leaves.
- Owner run. Bill Connerney owns the business, answers the phone and books the jobs, and our team of experienced plumbers does the work. Rated 5.0 on Google across 20 reviews, and BBB accredited since 2018.
Questions people ask
- One zone is cold and the rest of the house is fine. Is that the boiler?
- Usually not. If the boiler is heating the other zones, it is making heat, and the cold room is not getting it. The common reasons are a zone valve that is not opening, a pump that has stopped, trapped air in that loop, or a thermostat that is not calling for heat. Feel the pipe leaving the boiler for that zone while it should be running. If it is cold, nothing is moving, and that points to the zone.
- The pressure gauge keeps dropping and I keep topping the system up. Is that normal?
- No. A heating system should hold its pressure. Losing it means water is leaving somewhere: a safety valve that is dripping, an expansion tank that has stopped doing its job, or a leak in the piping, sometimes inside a wall or under a slab where it does not show. Each top up brings in fresh water, which corrodes the inside of the system over time. Find the leak rather than feed it.
- The boiler makes a noise like a kettle. Is that dangerous?
- It is a warning, and it should not be ignored. The sound is water boiling inside the boiler because it is moving through too slowly or there is scale built up. Causes include a failing pump, a partly closed valve, a setting that is too high, or scale. Left alone it strains the boiler, and a cracked boiler has to be replaced. Banging when the boiler shuts off is usually air in the pipes, which is a different fix.
- Should we replace a boiler that still works?
- Sometimes the honest answer is not yet. A boiler that is running cleanly and holding pressure can keep going, and replacing it buys efficiency rather than reliability it already has. The reasons to plan a replacement are parts getting hard to find, the boiler starting to leak, or repairs coming closer together. If the replacement is going to be a high efficiency unit, the house has to suit it, which is the conversation on the high efficiency page.
Related services
Where we work
Based in Natick, working across MetroWest Massachusetts.
Plus the surrounding MetroWest towns. If you are nearby, call and ask.
Call us, or request service
Tell us what is going on. If no one picks up, leave a message and Bill will call you back as soon as he can. If it is easier to write it down, the form reaches the same place.