This is from Rona from Cambridge:

“Dennis Foley has helped me renovate a small Queen Anne house in North Cambridge over the past thirty years.  He has installed garbage disposals and dishwashers; he has gutted and rebuilt the kitchen, two bathrooms, and assorted other rooms; he has replaced hot water tanks and toilet stacks, installed a wood-burning stove, and reclaimed a front porch – so I guess you can say that he has done it all – even including the kitchen sink!

Dennis is particularly creative in solving problems encountered in old houses – somehow, he has always been able to find relatively simple solutions to what seem to be insoluble problems.  He understands budgeting constraints and he has always been willing to think through alternative approaches and to identify trade-offs that can help lower costs.  I have long relied on his judgment about where the money needs to be spent on any given project.

The quality of Dennis’s work has never varied – the plumbing doesn’t leak, the windows don’t leak, the chimney doesn’t leak.  Those are strong statements since some of the work is now twenty to thirty years old.  He has always been honest and straightforward and accountable and most importantly, accessible in an emergency.  I wouldn’t trust my home to anyone else.”

This is the reason for my tag line, “A Name You Can Trust!”. I may not always be perfect, and I have been wrong a few times, but you can trust that I’m always trying to have YOUR best interests at heart. It’s who I am, and who I make sure the people who work for me to are.

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First there’s the issue of protection. We live in an area where most of the houses are old, and have been remodeled at least once, so there can be a lot of layers of bathroom to remove. And remove we do. We take it all, right down to the studs and subfloor, or floor joists. If we are going to put in a bathroom that’s going to last for a good long while, we really need to get right down to the framing. Adding more layers of finish on top of other questionable finishes is just going to cause trouble down the road. That trouble may happen well past our warranty period, but we have a lot of pride in what we do and don’t want our clients to have any problems for a long time. We have to do a lot of protection of the rest of the house for when we rip off all those layers. We cover floors that we have to cross with a cardboard like floor protection material, and then put plywood on top of that, all taped down. We close up our route to the outside with plastic, and plastic walls with zippers when we need them. We spend a lot of time doing this. Our goal is no dust in the rest of the house.  Period. We just finished a bathroom for a client who has serious sensitivities to dust and chemical smells, and while she couldn’t stay in the house while we did the work, I’m happy to report we did keep all her rooms clean!

Next is framing. If the floor isn’t level, we fix it. If the walls aren’t straight, we straighten them. When we’re done we want everything to be as level and square as we can get it!  We reinforce the floors to fix all the old damage that was done in the past by leaks, trades or bugs. We are just in the process of finishing a bathroom where we basically found no floor joists left. Due to inadequate repairs that had been performed in the past, the shower had been leaking for years into the condo below, doing who knows what damage, and leading to an infestation of ants, which we had treated while it was all ripped out.

Next we make sure that the plumbing is all up to date. We remove any old lead, brass or galvanized piping, and replace it with new PVC pipe and fittings, making sure that everything is vented as it needs to be. We replace any old water piping with copper tubing. No, we still aren’t using PEX tubing. I think I’ll give it a few more years to see what problems might develop with it. We’ve already seen some squirrels eat through it in a house in Brookline, twice, causing a lot of damage to the second floor apartment.

We do whatever heating is needed. In the bath we are just finishing, the heat is one pipe steam. The original radiator was a wall hung cast iron type, but someone had come along and replaced it with a plain piece of pipe, hammering out a bunch of tiles in the process. We actually found a wall hung type of radiator and had it sandblasted and refinished and installed it to bring the bathroom back to what it once was.

The electrician is next.  The new code requires a separate feed for the bathroom, so we take care of that, and install a ceiling fan that is so quiet you can hardly tell when it’s running. Most of the time that is a fan, light and nightlight combination. We install a receptacle and a light over the mirror, with everything on separate switches. And that exhaust fan gets vented outside.

Next time I’ll write about the rest of the process.

This is what it is and how it works!

The Denny Club is really a service shopping club. By being a memeber, you save many times the cost of membership every time we perform service to the mechanical systems in your home. Dennys Club members do not pay our normal $49.00 Disapatch and Diagnostic fee. They pay only $130.00 for emergency service, which is 1/2 off the normal $260.00 Emergency Dispatch fee. Any every service we perform is discounted, using the reduced rates that are published right in our price books.

Membership is onlyu $8.00 a month on a credit card, with a one year minimum membership. That’s it. it’s simple and it save you money.

Email me with any questions you may have.

The current tally of the damage: Wood and tile floors removed from the whole first floor, kitchen, living room, front hall.

One computer ruined as it was on top of some cardboard boxes that collapsed when they got wet.

Some of the walls have to be gutted because of water absorption.

The kitchen cabinets are ruined because they were formica on a particle board base (read sponge).

The bathroom vanity ditto.

The basement insulation was all ruined.

All the stuff stored in the basement was ruined.

There may be some damage to the house under the siding. Unknow at this time.

Many personal items ruined.

The living room furniture is still an open question.

All of this happed in a few hours. Naturally I showed up that day and changed the hoses to no burst braided hoses, but talk about being a day late and a dollar short!

So here’s my advice: First, change those hoses, and I wouldn’t trust the ones from a big box store to be made from  quality materials. Buy them from a plumbing supply company if you can. You may be able to do this yourself, or you may have your plumber do it (you might even hire us!) but do it today. Second, make sure you have a valve that can turn the water off easily to the hoses. If you have a single lever washing machine valve, use it when you aren’t doing wash. If you were religous about shutting off the water you wouldn’t have to worry about the hoses. If you have 2 of the old round handle valves, you should at least have your plumber either install a single lever valve, or new 1/4 turn valves on the hot and cold lines that are easy to shutoff.

Change those hoses!!!

For a while this year we weren’t permited to use it, because it’s been found to be damaged by nearby electrical storms if it isn’t bonded properly. That has somehow been addressed in the codes, so it is allowed again, but do you really want your safety to be in the hands of the gas fitter doing the electrical bonding?

Should I mention people hanging there wet laundry on the pipe in the basement using wire hangers? Steel pipe won’t be hurt by that (although I still wouldn’t reccomend it), but CSST might be.

Yes, it is legal. Yes, it is allowed in our state now.  Developers like it. Illegal handymen like it. Lazy gas fitters like it. But we don’t.  I don’t think too many plumbing inspectors like it either, but they have to allow it if it’s installed propely.

Be on time, or at least communicate if things change. We all know they can.

Be polite, not too loud, respectful of your home.

Clean up and take away any trash.

Do what you said you would, when you said you’d do it.

These are not complicated, and when I first went into business for myself 30 years ago, people asked me how I thought I would do. My reply was always, “Well, I have a broom and I clean up after myself. That puts me miles ahead of any other plumber I’ve ever seen on a job, or electrician or carpenter, so I’ll probably do OK!” And that turned out to be true. Everyone who works for me is taught these things, not just as company policy but as a way of thinking about someone else’s house, so we’ve done OK over the last 30 years. No, we aren’t perfect, but we do try to be.

The complicated part of customer service is being observant. Let me illustrate that with a story. Tom was in a house recently to install a faucet. He was admiring the recently remodeled house, but in talking with the owner discovered that the kitchen and the large family room attached to it was not comfortable in the winter. The owner ended up having us review the heating requirements of that space, and we are going to install a new Runtal radiator to supplement the heat, and we are also probably going to have icynene foam insulation sprayed into the family room floor. Yes, we do get some work out of this, but to me this is customer service. By listening and observing what the customer said, we ended up giving them something they knew they needed, but didn’t know how to address!

Here’s another one. Last winter I got a call to talk about replacing a  steam boiler in a really nice part of a really nice town. The kind of town people move to for the schools.  A nice house with a very nice young, professional family. The boiler had an ancient coal to gas conversion burner on it, the kind that we can’t get parts for anymore, but have to adapt something to it to make it work. I measured the radiators, which is how you size a steam boiler, and in doing so I realised that there were only one or two radiators on the first floor. Then I looked at the family and realised that they all had heavy sweaters on! So I just asked the question “Aren’t you people cold downstairs”? Then I got the stories of water freezing in the cat bowl in the kitchen and of coming home and just going to bed to stay warm. We ended up by installing hot water heat for the first floor, with some Runtal radiators, a 95% efficient Buderus boiler and a lifetime tank Superstore hot water heater. This winter we took out the rest of the radiators and installed 2 more zones of hot water heat. And they are now very comfortable.  They didn’t waste any more  money on that old steam boiler, and they are saving an enormous amount of fuel, while being comfortable at last. Yes, it’s sales, but it’s also customer service!!

And we still clean up after ourselves.

On top of that waste of money is the environmental disaster that bottled water is. That’s right, a disaster. If you fill one of those small bottles close to 1/3 full of oil, that will represent how much oil is consumed in the manufacture and distribution of that bottle. That’s crazy, especially when you think of how much we rely on foreign oil and all it’s attendant problems. look up bottled water on Wikipedia and read down to the environmental costs of all this bottled water consumption. Your throwaway water bottle contributes to that.  Plus, those bottles are clogging our landfills and showing up as pollution islands in the ocean. These bottles will last for thousands of years. Google water bottle landfill and read some of the articles. It’s amazing.

You can have an under counter water filter in your home and buy a refillable water bottle to carry with you. I use a stainless steel one that will last forever and is easily cleaned. It would actually be better than the soft drink companies filter, because they use reverse osmosis, which wastes 3 gallons of water for every gallon produced. That’s crazy too, and we won’t install them for that reason. We can install an undercounter filter in your kitchen,

a whole house filter and also a  chlorine removal shower head.

It makes sense in so many ways that I’m surprised everyone doesn’t have one!

In my house I also have an Instant Hot water dispenser, so I can make one cup of tea or coffee without using a coffee pot or boiling a pot of water. The water for the instant hot is filtered, so it tastes great as well.

Does turning the thermostat down save money? The short answer is yes.   The flow of heat from the house to the outside is proportional to difference between the temperature inside the house and the temperature of the air outside. if you allow the house to cool down,  that difference is made smaller and therefore the heat flow to the outside is less.

This means that by reducing the temperature

Digital setback thermostat

inside your house less energy  is required to maintain that cooler inside temperature.

Some people argue that the energy you use bringing it up to temperature negates the savings, but that energy use is  actually canceled out by the fact that when you do turn it down, it doesn’t run for that period of  time that the house is cooling off.

The average home will save about 2 percent for each degree you turn the temperature down for 8 hours. So it is worth turning it down for the day, or overnight. It does save money. You may not save much turning it down for a few hours. So if you turn it down from 70F to 65F overnight or during the day when no one is home, you should save around 10%!

There is one really large problem with turning the heat down when you go away, and it’s the reason that we advise our clients to leave the heat set at whatever their NORMAL turned down temperature is.

Over my 35 years of doing plumbing and heating, I have seen  dozens of freeze ups that have occurred in houses where the heat is NOT broken.

Here is the typical scenario: The homeowner is going away for a month to Florida. Lucky them!  So off they go, usually early on a cold morning, heading to the Expressway to go to Logan airport. The last thing they do as they leave the house in January is to turn the thermostat down to 55F. After all, no one is home so there is no need to keep the house any warmer. Normally they turn it down to 62F when they go to bed and it’s never a problem,  so why not turn it lower? Let’s see, another 7degrees, for 30 days, why they should save a good 14% off their energy bill, which is $350 a month, so that’s a savings of  $49.00. Here is the problem: when they left, the house was up to 70F as they got ready, then when they left they turned it down to 55F. They’ve done all the right things, fixed and caulked windows and doors and insulated where they could, so the house looses hear pretty slowly.  That 15 degree cooling off period takes most of the day, so the heat doesn’t come on until the afternoon. That long off period means that any piping in the house that isn’t far away from an outside wall has a chance to freeze and burst.

Burst pipe

This could be (and commonly is) water piping above the kitchen that has a breeze blowing on it down the joist bay. Normally there is enough heat around the house to prevent this from being a problem, but this day the heat is off all day.  Then the heat comes on, the pipe thaws, and there is a major disaster, that could go on for days! I’m pretty sure that this will cost a lot more than $40.00 to deal with.

My recommendation, to all my clients, is to leave the heat on the lowest normal temperature that you have set on your thermostat. I myself leave my heat on 62F, which is what is it set on overnight and most of the day, and I have a friend in my neighborhood check my house once a day. There are also various types of alarms that could be set to notify someone  when there is a problem, from simple thermostatically controlled light switching, to automated dialers that could be installed.

So turn your heat down, but be careful when you go away.

Let me tell you a few stories.

We went to look at a leaking waste pipe in  the basement of one condo, it was a converted two family house, so there were only two units. The leak was in an old cast iron drain that served both units, kitchens and bathrooms. The leak was fairly active, and kind of disgusting. We gave our client a price, and she was going to approve it. We would have had it fixed that day or the next, as it was leaking sewage into the basement. She just said that she had to talk to the other owner and then we could come and fix it, please. Well, as you might have guessed, when she talked to the other owner he really didn’t care that much about it. First, he hadn’t really been aware of it, as I guess he didn’t use the basement. Second he didn’t think he should pay for it. And third, he said if he did have to pay for it, he would find someone cheaper!  The last I talked to her, the pipe still wasn’t fixed. Was she going to have to take her housemate to court? Was she going to have to put up with some butt crack plumber making a mess of her basement and leaving his trash behind?  Who knows! This is one aspect of condo living!

We had a top floor client who house mates didn’t want to pay for a new roof. After all, it wasn’t leaking on them!

Multi family condos

Recently we’ve been trying to deal with a client’s problems  whose heat freezes when it’s really cold out. The problem is, she is the top of three floors, and the chairman of the condo association lives below her and isn’t interested in helping her fix it. He would barely even turn up his heat to try to thaw it (we aren’t sure if he did turn it up- he was very rude to us and we weren’t able to go into his unit to see). The problem is, her pipes run up his wall, and any fixing of her problem will probably involve some demo in his unit. Does she have the right to do it? Of course she does, as it is a common heating system and it needs to be fixed. The question is, what is she going to go through to get that done? Now the management company is involved, so we have no idea what will happen, and we have no standing with the management company, so we won’t be in there looking out for our client, which is where we want to be. Who knows what will happen.

I don’t mean to be completely negative. After all, it’s the only way that many people in Massachusetts can afford to get into the housing market. I just want you all to be aware of some of the potential pitfalls of condo living. I’ll probably tell you more stories another time. What I won’t be telling you about are all the condos that do work out OK for people. After all, happy stories aren’t that entertaining.

Caveat Emptor!!

Lifetime Hot Water Tank

You know, it’s really funny that I’ve already written about high efficiency oil fired boilers, and about steam boilers, when the majority of the boilers that we install aren’t either one!

Nowadays, with the cost of fuel escalating, and with our country’s reliance on foreign energy products, we feel it’s really our duty to recommend installing high efficiency boilers whenever it’s possible.  It’s in everyone’s best interest.

A boiler is a large and long term investment, and to not install  the best, most efficient  product available at the time of installation usually leads to regrets within a few years. Make no mistake- fuel costs will go up. While it might cost more to install now, you’re savings will be that much more in the future.

Our favorite boiler to install is the Buderus GB142 series of hot water boilers.

This is a modulating, condensing boiler that can deliver up to 95% AFUE, especially in the shoulder months when the heat is not needed to full capacity. Even in colder weather you’ll get 90% or so. Your heating system will be more comfortable and you will get even greater savings, because the boiler comes with an outdoor reset control that will adjust the water temperature in the system based on the outside temperature. That’s designed right into the boiler system.

Lately we’ve been experimenting with turning the temperatures down on our systems to further enhance savings. With this type of boiler, if you can keep the system return temperature below 150 degrees, you’re going to get that 95% fuel usage. We can just about guarantee a savings of 30% off your gas bill, and one of my clients has saved over 50%! Since he was smart enough to have us install this boiler 2 years ago, he’s way ahead of the game on energy usage and savings. As are a lot of my folks, as you can see from my pictures.

When we do install these boilers, we  also reccomend installing an indirectly fired hot water heater, usually a Superstore 40 or 60 gallon one depending on the size of your household. It just makes sense to take advantage of your 95% AFUE boiler by using it to heat your hot water, in a tank that is guaranteed for life! That’s right, no more burst tanks to clean up after. That will add to your long term savings!!