Boilers are the critical circulatory systems of buildings. With a lifespan of 30 to 60 years, your boiler may not need replacement now, but it will, and usually sooner than you'd think. Or, maybe the high cost of fuel will spur a retrofit with an electronic monitor to control temperature fluctuations. Or, perhaps you just need to do simple maintenance and cleaning.

Most boards replace boilers only as a last resort. You have to consider not only the $20,000-and-up replacement cost of the two main components — the "tea kettle," where the water is heated for circulation, and the burner (or furnace), which burns oil or gas and generates the heat that boils the water — but also the costs of disassembling and carting away the old equipment and the likely need to install a new heat timer and control panel. The total can reach a couple of hundred thousand dollars or more.

In with the New, Backing Up with the Old

In dealing with the rundown boiler at the 148-unit 504-510 West 110th Street, engineer Young Suh of Rand Engineering & Architecture devised a plan calling for the demolition of the defunct coal-fired boiler, the refurbishment of the current boiler as a backup unit, plus the installation of a new unit and the digging of trenches outfitted with sump pumps to deal with the water in the basement. To increase boiler efficiency, Suh recommended that the five dozen or so two-inch tubes that bring heat from the burner into the boiler's water tank be cleaned of the soot that had lined them during normal operation. Since the old boiler would now be used only as a backup, he didn't recommend a burner replacement, which could have cost $10,000.

The price of the job was projected to be around $300,000. The board requested bids from three boiler-installation companies in October 2007, and the project was well under way when shareholders met in November for their annual meeting.

The seven-member board liked Suh's approach, says David Estrin, the president, because "he didn't seem to be telling us what he thought we wanted to hear." The directors picked the winning bidder on the boiler job, Controlled Combustion, for similar reasons. "They seemed to be less positive," Estrin says. "The other firm we considered said that everything was going to be perfect, and we knew it likely wouldn't be." By contrast, says Estrin, Controlled Combustion was matter-of-fact about possible problems and direct about how it would handle them.

Today, the co-op's new boiler is in place and running, a trench has been dug, sump pumps have been installed and the old boiler is being renovated. The board is "ecstatic" about how work has progressed. Suh has written 11 progress reports to the board, which Estrin describes as "a very cohesive unit."

Interest-Free Loan

To repair or replace became an issue at the 65-unit Nameoke Court Condominium in Far Rockaway, Queens. There the board knew it had to replace an antiquated, 1960s boiler system that featured a series of boilers operating in tandem. Observes board president Mark Wiseman, "It was a poor design and a poor application."

Steve Greenbaum, director of management at Mark Greenberg Realty, says Nameoke Court had another problem: "The building was in real financial hardship; they just didn't have any money." What it did have was being wasted on repairs and ongoing violations. "We had a ton of shutdowns, and when we did have the boiler [system] running it overheated the building. … The board refused to raise common charges, so there was nothing we could do except try to get a loan, which looked impossible."

Despite all this, the board and Greenbaum eventually landed a five-year, interest-free loan option from KeySpan. The Brooklyn boiler-installation firm Abilene replaced the burner, keeping the "tea kettle," and converted from oil to gas heat. The board hired engineer Ronald Krigsman of Lawrence, N.Y., to supervise the work and draw up design specs.

The new system at Nameoke, says Krigsman, "is controlled by one overall unit that senses when heating has started and that also senses the heat of the water on its return to the boiler." The boiler cycles on and off depending on the desired temperature of the circulating water.