Home maintenance in New York

What's different about New York

• 1

  Steam heat, and the parts that actually fail

  A large share of New York's older housing runs on steam: brownstones, prewar apartment buildings, townhouses, and plenty of upstate houses built before 1950. Steam is a genuinely good system, and it fails in ways that have nothing to do with modern furnaces, which is why generic HVAC advice is close to useless for it.

  First, know which system you have. One pipe running into the radiator, with a small metal air vent on the side, is one-pipe steam. Two pipes with a steam trap at the outlet is two-pipe. A radiator with two pipes and a bleed valve on top is hot water, not steam. Steam radiators get hot enough to burn; hot-water radiators generally don't.

  Learn to read the noises, because they're diagnostic:

  Banging or hammering is almost never the boiler. It's condensate that can't drain back, so steam slams into pooled water. The usual cause is a radiator that's lost its pitch or a failed air vent holding water where it shouldn't be. Brief hissing at the start of a cycle is an air vent doing exactly its job, letting air out so steam can get in. Continuous hissing after the radiator is already hot is a vent stuck open. Replace it. A radiator that stays cold while others heat is usually a clogged or painted-over air vent, not a dead boiler.

  On a schedule:

  Every year, before heating season: professional boiler service. On steam that includes flushing the low water cutoff, checking the sight glass, cleaning the pressure control and its pigtail, and a combustion check. The low water cutoff is the safety device that shuts the burner down before the boiler runs dry, and it's the one nobody thinks about until it fails. Every year: walk the radiators. Air vents are inexpensive and they're consumable parts, not permanent fixtures. Replace any that hiss continuously or sit on a cold radiator. Every year: check the pitch. A one-pipe radiator should tilt very slightly back toward the pipe that feeds it, so condensate drains out instead of pooling. A shim under the far legs fixes a radiator that's drifted level. Two-pipe systems: steam traps are wear items, generally replaced on a five-to-seven-year cycle. A building with 200 radiators has 200 traps, and they fail independently. Never paint an air vent. It's the single most common way a working radiator gets killed.

• 2

  Snow load and ice dams in the snowbelt

  Upstate New York gets more snow than almost anywhere else in the country that has cities in it. Ground snow loads run roughly 40 to 80 pounds per square foot around Buffalo and Erie County, higher in the belt south of the city toward Hamburg and Orchard Park, and well past 100 in parts of the Adirondacks and toward Tug Hill. Your roof was built for a number. Snow doesn't check it.

  Two different problems, and they need different responses.

  Ice dams are an attic problem. Heat escaping the living space melts snow on the upper roof, the water runs to the cold overhang and refreezes, and the ridge of ice that builds up backs the next round of meltwater under the shingles. People see icicles and blame the roof. The fix is above the ceiling:

  Every fall: get into the attic. Insulation even and at full depth with no compressed or missing patches, especially over exterior walls. Soffit vents clear, not packed with insulation. Bath fans and dryer vents exhausting outside rather than into the attic. On a cold day after snowfall: compare your roof to the neighbors'. If yours is melting clear and theirs isn't, that's your heat leaving the house.

  Snow load is a weight problem. Watch for it after long-duration lake-effect events, and especially where snow can't slide off:

  Low-slope roofs, porch roofs, garage roofs, and additions carry the most risk. Drifting matters more than total depth. Snow piles deeper against dormers, chimneys, and where a second story meets a lower roof. Warning signs to take seriously: doors or windows that suddenly stick, new cracks in interior drywall or plaster, sagging ceilings, or creaking. Those are structural signals, not house quirks. If you rake, leave two to three inches on the surface. Scraping to bare shingle damages the roofing. Rake from the ground. People die falling off roofs and ladders doing this every winter, and the professional visit costs far less than the alternative.

• 3

  The sidewalk you don't own but do have to fix

  In New York City, the sidewalk in front of your building belongs to the city and is your responsibility to maintain. That's Administrative Code §7-210 and §19-152, and it catches a lot of first-time owners completely off guard.

  What that actually means:

  Liability follows the property owner. If someone trips on a defective flag in front of your building and is injured, courts have consistently held the adjacent owner responsible, including when the damage came from tree roots or ordinary wear. The duty can't be delegated to a tenant or a management company. DOT issues Notices of Sidewalk Violation for defects like cracks, uneven flags, missing flags, and improper slope. There's no fine attached to the notice itself, and you generally have 75 days to repair. The real cost is elsewhere: the notice gets filed with the county clerk and stays there until the work is done, which complicates a sale or a refinance. DOT generally doesn't issue those notices to one-, two-, and three-family homes. The liability still applies. The violation is the smaller risk; the lawsuit is the bigger one. If a city tree caused it, owners of one-, two-, and three-family homes may qualify for free repair through the NYC Parks Trees and Sidewalks Program. It's worth applying, and it's also worth knowing the program handles thousands of requests a year and prioritizes by severity rather than by date received. Permits: DOT requires a sidewalk construction permit for most repairs above a threshold size. A licensed contractor should handle that.

  On a schedule: walk your sidewalk every spring. Freeze-thaw is one of the listed causes of sidewalk defects, and April is when winter's damage is visible and still small. You're looking for vertical lift between flags, cracks wide enough to catch a toe, and slabs that have sunk or tipped. Catching a single lifted flag is a repair. Ignoring it for four years is a claim.

  One more, for anyone who owns a three-plus-unit building: NYC Local Law 152 requires gas piping inspection by a Licensed Master Plumber every four years, on a rotating schedule by community district, with certification filed to DOB. One- and two-family homes classified R-3 are exempt. A brownstone with three units generally is not, and owners are often surprised to learn their DOF building classification doesn't match what they assumed.

New York home maintenance questions