It’s easy to take a heated home for granted. Until you don’t have it and you go outside on a 50-degree day to warm up. At the beginning of November, we didn’t have heat and cold weather was looming. We had sent out our radiators for restoration in August – back when we were melting in 90-degree days without air conditioning. Who knew that radiator restoration could take so long?

I’ve never had radiator steam heat, but everyone advised us to keep it. Not only are radiators a beautiful part of an old house’s character, steam heat is also far more desirable than dry, forced air heat. This house had 11 beautiful old radiators. Most of them are Rococo radiators manufactured by American Radiator as shown in this 1910 catalog.  It seems like it would be a simple job to restore them, but it’s not. The four main floor radiators, made by the U.S. Radiator Company, are huge, weighing 500-600 pounds! We believe that these large radiators are oversized because they were put in the late 1910s. Heating systems following the Spanish influenza epidemic of 1919 were required to keep houses warm even with the windows open, because fresh-air was considered important to fight disease. We are not planning to keep our windows open this winter and don’t need these huge radiators, but they are a part of this house’s character. The problem with this size is that someone needed to move them to bring them to the restorer.

David found a company to move the radiators but they were clearly not motivated since they stopped responding to his email.  Finally, he found a company in New York that could complete the entire job. They stripped, sand blasted and painted each radiator. Then they pressure-tested them to be sure they would work.

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Unfortunately, the pressure testing exposed a whole in one of the radiators. The repair didn’t hold, so we had to look for a replacement radiator. And it meant yet another delay in our installation date. We eyed the weather forecast where we saw a cold snap looming. Eventually, we got a solid date for their return.

The moving crew required three large guys and a trolley to get the finished radiators back into place. Then we needed a steam heat expert to check out the boiler and get the system running. We were very grateful when Burrows and Son Heating & Cooling fit us into a schedule that was full through the end of December!

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I was on vacation in California when the radiators finally arrived. Below is the text conversation I had with David and Darrin.  Yes, heat really is beautiful and so are the painted radiators!

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Our house wasn’t a tropical paradise right away. At one point, our new Nest thermostat decided to heat our house to 53 degrees. Plus, balancing the steam is quite a project.  The boiler produces steam, which takes up 1700x the volume of water!  Steam expands, reaches the radiators, and gives up its vapor transition heat when it condenses to water.  The trick is to get the steam to all of the radiators at approximately the same time.  Therefore there are a variety of steam vents that we had to use to try to balance the steam.  Below, you can see the main vents we added to the downstairs, and an adjustable vent that operates when we want to be able to shut off the heat locally.  All in all it is a work in progress, which involves learning skills from people who designed these systems, who are all dead now!

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