Boiler repair and replacement in North Vancouver

Hydronic heating on the North Shore

A good number of North Vancouver and West Vancouver homes are heated by water rather than air — cast iron radiators in the older houses, baseboard convectors in homes from the sixties and seventies, and in-floor radiant in newer builds and renovations.

Hydronic heating is comfortable and quiet, and a well-maintained boiler will outlast most furnaces. The trade-off is that boiler systems have more components that can drift out of adjustment — pumps, zone valves, expansion tanks, air separators, controls — and diagnosing them properly takes someone who works on them regularly rather than occasionally.

Boiler work in BC is licensed separately from gas fitting. Our boiler, pressure vessel and refrigeration contractor licence is LBP0212329.

Commercial and multi-family plants

We also work on the larger end of this — commercial boilers and burners in strata buildings, high-rises and light commercial sites, along with the pumps, headers, expansion tanks and controls around them. That work needs a boiler, pressure vessel and refrigeration contractor licence rather than a gas ticket alone, which is what LBP0212329 covers. If you're a strata council or property manager looking for planned maintenance rather than a one-off repair, we can set that up.

Common faults, and what they usually mean

• Radiators cold at the top, warm at the bottom — air trapped in the system. Bleeding usually fixes it, but air that keeps returning points to a leak drawing air in, or a failing expansion tank.
• Some zones heat, others don't — typically a zone valve or a circulator pump for that loop, or a control fault rather than the boiler itself.
• The boiler locks out and needs resetting — repeated lockouts are the system protecting itself. Common causes are low water pressure, ignition failure, or a blocked condensate trap on a condensing boiler.
• Pressure keeps dropping — a leak somewhere in the loop, or a waterlogged expansion tank. Topping it up repeatedly is treating a symptom.
• Banging or kettling — scale on the heat exchanger, or circulation problems.
• Short cycling — firing and stopping repeatedly, often an oversized boiler or a control problem. It wears the equipment and wastes fuel.

Repair or replace

Boilers last longer than furnaces. A cast iron boiler can run 30 years or more, and a well-maintained modern condensing boiler 15 to 20. That longevity means repair is more often the right answer than it is with a furnace.

The case for replacing usually rests on efficiency rather than failure. Older atmospheric boilers, of the kind still heating plenty of North Shore homes, run at a substantially lower efficiency than a modern condensing unit. If yours is 25 or 30 years old and needing regular attention, replacement can pay for a meaningful part of itself over time.

What we won't do is push a replacement on a boiler that's running well because it happens to be old. Some of the cast iron units in this area will outlive their owners, and there's no sense replacing something that works.

Replacing an old boiler

Swapping an atmospheric boiler for a condensing one isn't a straight substitution. Condensing boilers vent differently — usually a sidewall vent rather than the existing chimney — and they produce acidic condensate that needs a proper drain and, in some installations, neutralising.

They also only reach their rated efficiency when the return water is cool enough for the flue gases to condense, which depends on how your emitters are sized and how the controls are set. A condensing boiler bolted onto a system designed for high water temperatures won't deliver what the label promises. Sizing and system design matter here as much as the equipment.

We do a proper heat loss calculation rather than matching the output of whatever is currently there. Older boilers were very often oversized, and simply matching it carries that mistake into the new system.

Maintenance

Boilers reward annual servicing more than most equipment. A yearly check covers combustion and venting, the condensate trap on condensing units, system pressure and the expansion tank, pumps and zone valves, water quality and inhibitor levels, and the safety controls.

Water quality in particular gets overlooked. A sealed hydronic system should hold treated water with a corrosion inhibitor. Systems repeatedly topped up with fresh water accumulate oxygen and minerals that corrode components and coat the heat exchanger with scale.