I bought my first house in May of 1991 and hadn’t turned the heat on as fall arrived, trying to save a few dollars. Catching up on repairs to the century-old house was already eating into my bank account.
It was one of those gray November mornings in York County when summer suddenly sinks into winter.
The house was already cold inside when I finally decided to go through the process of waking up an ancient gravity-flow water heating system that proudly wore a metal, riveted boiler plate stamped with a manufacture date of 1951. The heating system ran about 10 minutes when water started seeping out of the cast-iron heat exchanger pooling up around my feet on the basement floor…