- Available 24/7 for Emergency Service
If your building’s boiler goes down in January, you don’t have time for a company that’s still figuring out your equipment. Backflow Prevention of New York provides boiler repair, installation, and maintenance for residential and smaller commercial buildings across all five boroughs, with a four-hour response guarantee on emergency calls.
Our Licensed Master Plumber oversees every boiler job we take on. We service Weil-McLain, Burnham, Peerless, Lochinvar, Laars, and Intellihot boilers, working on systems up to 1.5 million BTUs, the range that covers most residential buildings and smaller commercial properties in NYC. Our technicians are factory-trained on Lochinvar equipment.
Most of our boiler customers come through property management companies. Their maintenance agreements save time more than money: one less emergency to track down a plumber for, and priority response when something goes wrong.
If you own and manage your own building, a maintenance plan is a different calculation. It’s a real cost, and you’re the one paying it, so it makes sense to weigh a plan against calling us only when something breaks. Either way, the same technicians and 4-hour response guarantee apply. If you’d rather pay for repairs as they come up instead of committing to a plan, that’s a reasonable call. We’ll walk you through both options honestly rather than push the plan by default.
We’re not anti-heat pumps. If your building adds a heat pump system, keep the boiler. You’ll still need it to carry the coldest two months of the year, and a working boiler as backup costs far less than losing heat entirely.
If your boiler fails without warning, we can typically respond within 4 hours, often within 2. If a building’s boiler goes down and needs replacement or extended repair, temporary heat through a mobile boiler unit is an option. It runs roughly $1,200 a day plus fuel, with costs that can climb toward $15,000 in the first week alone. Preventive maintenance is almost always cheaper than the alternative.
For gas piping inspections and LL152 compliance, see our Gas Services page.
We’ve picked up boiler contracts from buildings that switched after a bad experience with another company. A common story: the building’s previous maintenance agreement didn’t cover overtime labor. They found out the hard way, mid-winter, when they got billed on top of an agreement they thought covered everything. BPNY contracts spell out labor coverage clearly, and off-contract overtime rates are stated up front, not discovered on an invoice.
Boilers can fail in a lot of different ways. Common issues include electrical and control problems, leaks, gas valve failures, and steam pressure problems. Because there’s such a wide range of what can go wrong, a repair visit starts as a diagnostic job: our technicians identify the problem first. Many repairs turn out to be a simple part replacement once we know what’s causing it.
One repair issue we catch often: a minor leak that another company will tell you means you need a new boiler. In most cases, it doesn’t. We use Hercules Boiler Liquid, a leak-sealing additive that costs about $11.35 a bottle and fixes many minor leaks. That beats a replacement bill that can run $20,000 or more. If your boiler needs replacing, we’ll tell you. If it doesn’t, we won’t try to sell you one.
New boiler installations start with detailed plans, worked out with the engineers brought in for the job before any work begins. We replace old boilers outright when that’s the right call, but replacement isn’t always necessary. On some jobs, we can add new sections to a boiler that’s 30 years old instead of tearing it out entirely.
Steam banging happens when standing water sits in a steam pipe and gets knocked around by steam moving through the system at high speed. As steam contacts that water, it can expand the water’s volume roughly 1,700 times almost instantly. That expansion is what causes the banging against pipes and radiators.
Two things usually cause it: pipes that aren’t pitched correctly, or a boiler that’s calibrated with too much pressure. The fix matches the cause: re-pitching pipes so water drains back toward the boiler instead of pooling, and recalibrating the boiler itself. It’s a common complaint in older NYC buildings, and it’s fixable without replacing anything.
We schedule maintenance visits in the summer, when your boiler is already off and heat isn’t a concern for tenants. A standard visit takes 3-4 hours and includes:
Skipping maintenance doesn’t just risk a breakdown. Sludge buildup fogs the sight glass, which means you can no longer accurately read water height. A boiler running on sludge instead of clean water works much harder than it needs to. We’ve caught failed secondary low water cutoffs during routine visits before. That, paired with a failed primary cutoff, can mean catastrophic damage. You wouldn’t know it happened without the inspection.
A standard maintenance plan starts at $2,200 per boiler, scheduled annually.
Add-on services, available individually and not mutually exclusive:
What’s covered: Maintenance plans cover labor on any service call. Parts are billed separately. Contract holders get priority response during emergencies, so you’re not waiting behind non-contract customers when something breaks.
Weekly upkeep: During heating season, your building’s low water cutoff needs to be flushed weekly. Your super can do this without a licensed technician on site.
Off-contract emergency work: Calls outside regular business hours are billed at double time, plus two hours of travel time. Contract holders avoid this exposure and get a faster response.
No maintenance plan can guarantee that. Contract holders do get priority response when something goes wrong, since our technicians already know their equipment.
Summer. Your boiler is already off, so there’s no disruption to the building, and it gives us time to catch and fix anything before New York’s October 1st heating requirement.
Sludge builds up in the tank, fogging the sight glass so you can’t accurately read water height, and making the boiler work harder to heat through it.
The low water cutoff needs a weekly flush during heating season, and a super or homeowner can do that without a technician present. Beyond that, checking for water on the floor and keeping the boiler room clear of flammable storage are good habits. The rest is a job for a licensed technician.
If your boiler needs an extended repair or replacement, temporary heat through a mobile boiler is available.
Don’t wait for a breakdown to think about your boiler.
Call (718) 460-4600 or contact us online today.
