Plumber in Milton.

Milton runs from grand nineteenth-century houses on Milton Hill down to solid interwar and post-war family housing, with the Blue Hills at its back. A high proportion of the older stock was built with hydronic heating and a good deal of it still runs on the original distribution — cast-iron radiators, long copper and steel runs, and a boiler that is the third or fourth to sit in that spot.

The distribution in these houses is frequently in better condition than the plant attached to it. Old cast iron will happily outlive several boilers, which means a heating replacement here is usually a question of matching new equipment to old distribution properly rather than tearing everything out. Done well it is a straightforward job; done carelessly it is a decade of uneven heat.