Boiler repair & HVAC in Fort Greene, Brooklyn

We serve Fort Greene from our Ridgewood shop, about 16 min away. Plumbing, HVAC, boiler repair, heating, drains and gas piping. Emergency calls answered 24/7.

Fort Greene's residential blocks were built primarily between 1850 and 1875, making them among the oldest intact brownstone stock in Brooklyn — Italianate, Queen Anne, Neo-Grec, and Greek Revival row houses that predate even the large Park Slope construction wave. Buildings of this age were plumbed with whatever was standard at the time of original construction: early examples had limited interior plumbing and iron supply, while buildings from the 1870s onward used iron supply and cast-iron waste systems. The Fort Greene Historic District, designated in 1978, has kept much of the original building fabric intact, which also means original or early-generation mechanical systems are frequently still in place beneath renovated interiors. Building age and degree of prior renovation are the two variables that determine what a plumber actually finds when they open a wall in Fort Greene.

Our Fort Greene building from the 1860s doesn't have a bathroom on the second floor — can we add one?

Yes, adding a bathroom to an existing floor in a Fort Greene brownstone involves rough-in for supply (relatively straightforward), a drain connection (which requires either connecting to the existing DWV stack or running a new drain to the basement), and a vent. The constraints are the drain routing — gravity-drain rules apply — and whether opening the walls will affect structural lath or original plaster. We've done bathroom additions in Fort Greene buildings and can scope the plumbing rough-in after seeing the space.

We have no basement access to the drain stack in our Fort Greene building — how do you access pipes for repairs?

When basement access is blocked or unavailable, we work from cleanouts in the stack (if present), through floor cutouts above the horizontal runs, or from the attic on vertical sections. In a Fort Greene building where the stack is buried in a chase wall without accessible cleanouts, we sometimes add a cleanout during the repair to prevent the same problem in the future. It adds time to the job but pays for itself on the next service call.