But I need your love to keep away the cold

Before we could go any further with anything, including thinking or cooking or living, we had to deal with the heat. Lots of heat. Wearing tank tops (or sometimes nothing) in January heat.

We've got (sssst) steam heat. That is a great lyric for a song, but there are some practical problems, it turns out, with a steam heat system, particularly one that has seen essentially no upkeep in, oh, twenty-five years. There is the familiar banging of pipes, a phenomenon known as steam hammer, which results from hot steam meeting undrained cold water in a cold radiator. There is the godawful hiss of a calcified air valve, which is supposed to allow air to be pushed out of the radiator and then close when the hot steam arrives but gets stuck open after a while (or stuck closed, in which case the radiator doesn't heat properly). There is the problem of the valve to the radiator, which is supposed to allow us to turn each radiator off and on, but in reality gets corroded and makes noise and no longer turns off the radiators efficiently, if at all. Finally, there is the insoluble problem of the basic design of a steam heat system: the steam arrives at the bottom floors (us) at its hottest and cools as it gets up to the top floors (our tenants), so we are boiling hot when they get to a comfortable temperature.

So onto the scene came the plumbers. They replaced the valves to four radiators, capped and removed one radiator (we had one small room downstairs with two riser pipes and two radiators, guaranteeing subtropical temps), and best of all, replaced the gigantic kitchen radiator with the much more moderately sized one from downstairs. Illustration to the left. The kitchen is now at a perfectly reasonable temperature having the small radiator on for maybe one heating cycle per day. Imagine what we suffered with the Radiator That Ate Manhattan that we couldn't turn off, ever.

One more radiator problem remains. You can replace an air valve with nothing but your bare hands, a new valve from the corner hardware store, and three inches of Teflon tape. Easiest repair in the house. Unless, as in our tenants' apartment, the radiator in question has been BUILT INTO THE WINDOW FRAME. Then you have to take the radiator out completely to change the seven-dollar valve, which your plumbers will charge you $125 to do. So we're trying to figure out a way around that one.