J & B Mechanical, LLC

They were good. We have a 200 year old house and, in replacing all of that stuff, they had to know how to work in a house that old. These homes are in the Mt. Vernon Cultural District and the exterior of the homes come under the Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation. So, there are certain standards that you have to comply with, plus, the homes are fragile. You can't just have somebody come in, knocking walls down with a sledgehammer, 'cause you can do some damage. So, they know how to work on historic properties and how to fix or put in new systems while minimizing the disruption to the current architecture of the house. That really is the biggest thing, that they know how to work in an historical environment. Their cost for stripping out a huge steam boiler and removing 8 to 10 radiators, and all of the steam pipes that connected the boiler to the radiators on a 2 1/2 story house, and then installing duct-work and hiding it within the existing infrastructure so that it wasn't noticeable (and these are colonial homes so they weren't built to have things run up through the walls like they do these days), and insulating all of the lines, done with three guys over 3 1/2 days, was in total about $8000. I actually consider that to be very fair because that includes all the parts, the air-conditioner and the furnace and the duct work and the labor. And I've had no problem with it at all except once the furnace heat wasn't coming on because a sensor was dirty, so they simply came in and cleaned it. It's been working basically error-free without any serious problems, and they did that original work five years ago.

Paul and his guys worked with me to locate the duct runs in locations that worked both with the structure of the house and with the floor plan.