Plumbing & heating in Boston

We work the southwest side of Boston — West Roxbury, Jamaica Plain and Dorchester — rather than the city as a whole. They are the neighbourhoods that sit next to towns we already cover, and the run in from Milton or Dedham is a short one. Anything further north or east is somebody else’s ground and we will say so.

Dorchester and Jamaica Plain are triple-decker country, which is ground we know extremely well from Pawtucket and Fall River. Shared heating serving several units, boundaries between those units that nobody ever wrote down, and original supply pipe long past its span. The first job on a multi-family call is usually establishing whose pipe is whose, and doing it early saves a great deal of argument later.

West Roxbury is a different proposition — mostly single-family, a lot of it between the wars, with older Victorian stock on some streets and post-war building filling in behind. Bigger houses, longer runs, and heating that has been added to rather than replaced.