Safety First!
My best piece of advice..... Install a Carbon Monoxide (CO) detector! Carbon Monoxide is odourless, tasteless and invisible. It is unbelievable to me how many families are risking their health and lives by not protecting themselves from this deadly gas that is a by-product of EVERY gas burning appliance!
We can provide detectors for a fee, but honestly, any home improvement warehouse will be able to supply you with many different brands and configurations at a lower cost and we all here at Tribute feel they are an essential piece of your home heating system.
me with a boiler? Do you know how healthy your system is? Boiler systems use water, or a combination of glycol (an anti-freezing agent) and water to transfer the heat generated by the boiler throughout your home. If you've got air in the lines, you're not getting all the potential heat out of your system. If your fluid mixture is out of balance chemically, again, heat losses are possible. We all want to spend as little money as possible to heat our homes. Maintaining optimum conditions for your heating appliance reduces costs. We can test the fluid and make recomendations to save you money!
Does the piece of equipment on the left look familiar? It's a backflow preventer. It is part of the water supply line at your boiler. Did you know that it should be tested yearly? Do you have a boiler heating your home and don't think you've got a backflow preventer? The reason a bylaw was passed requiring installation and testing of this device is to prevent any of your boiler water mixing with your drinking water, or worse, contaminating the city supply outside your home. We are fully certified and equipped to handle all backflow issues. Give us a call so we can insure the safety of your potable water.
There are a few things to check before calling us if your toilet is running. Firstly, don't be afraid to remove the lid. Look inside! The fix could be as easy as noticing that water is spilling over the overflow, the white tube in the center of the tank. If that's the case, lower the water level by adjusting the float. Now if the water lever is dropping very slowly, it could be the flapper That's the rubber bit at the bottom of the tank. Try to realign it, but if that doesn't work, give us a call!
Do you have a tankless hot water heater? Do you have a water softener? Hard water is one of the biggest killers of tankless systems!! When hard water is heated within the unit's narrow waterway, minerals are deposited within the heat exchanger. Over time, these deposits will plug off the waterway, causing 
Are you experiencing a faucet that seems to have less water pressure than the others in the house? My advice, check the aerator. The aerator is the screen at the water outlet of the faucet. Most can be easily removed by hand. They contain fine screens that introduce air into the water stream, allowing nice laminar flow. Unfortunately, these screens also trap naturally occuring minerals in our non-softened hard water. Remove the aerator by unscrewing it from the faucet and clean it with a little CLR. If that doesn't work, give us a call! It could be a bigger issue requiring in-home water softening, but lets not get ahead of ourselves!
Wondering why it seems to take forever for the house to heat up? Even if everything looks normal in the Mechanical room? The furnace fires, the duct gets hot, and yet warm air isn't really being felt upstairs. Then the furnace turns off for a while, and the cycle repeats? First thing to check: the furnace filter. More than once, I've been called to a home to fix a low heat call only to find the filter plugged solid. A furnace with a plugged filter can't move enough air through itself to heat the home. 
