HVAC Repair & Installation Serving Allentown, PA

Allentown has some of the oldest housing in the region. One estimate has roughly 38% of homes built before 1940, and rowhouses and other attached homes are the single most common type, around a third of units. In that kind of house you tend to find old boilers, little or no ductwork and tight basements.

Boiler work in a rowhome is different from a detached house: shared walls, narrow basement access and piping that has usually been patched more than once. Some older rowhomes still run steam or gravity hot-water systems and others were converted long ago. On the outer edges there are detached houses, and those are the ordinary furnace-and-AC jobs.

Rentals are a large part of the picture too. Allentown requires rental units to be registered and to pass a city inspection for an annual license, so an owner with several units is usually better off having heating checked on a schedule than waiting for the first cold-weather tenant call.

On a steam boiler with uneven radiators, we look at the cheap causes first: water level and low-water cutoff, radiator vents and steam traps, pitch and blockage in return lines, and operating pressure. Those are often the real problem and cost far less than a replacement.

On hot-water boilers in rowhomes we check venting and flue condition, the circulator and expansion tank, leaks at old valves and unions, and combustion and carbon monoxide readings. Shared walls and small basements leave little margin for a bad flue.

For cooling a rowhome with no ducts, we walk each floor, count the rooms you want cooled, and look at where an outdoor unit can go (rear yard, wall bracket, roof) and what the panel can carry, before laying out a single or multi-zone ductless system.