And to think, you almost unleashed them on your gorgeous, newly installed hydronic system. Talk about creating your own risk of callbacks. 

Anyone can buy a bunch of high-quality components, stick them together, keep the water on the inside, and call it a hydronic heating system. It’s not that difficult. The real skill of an exceptional professional lies in understanding what these different components do and then picking the ones that will work together best for each individual system.

My daughter Erin, along with her three sisters, grew up listening to me talk nonstop about hydronic heating. Erin recently bought a house with a furnace.

It took six firefighters to get the kid out of the duct, and Mama got older. Much older.

When it comes to boilers and water heaters, manufacturers are sensing an ongoing trend — the move to higher-efficiency models.

Water heater and boiler manufacturers are diligently introducing high-efficiency systems into the marketplace with the goal of making life easier for both the contractor and the consumer. 

These days, it’s not just going into a house and installing a cast-iron boiler. Today’s units offer consumers multiple choices regarding efficiency and performance. 

High efficiency comes with a price that’s higher than normal efficiency (whatever that is), and because of that higher price, high efficiency is now a subjective term that is open to broad interpretation, and perhaps even reinvention.