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Heating Older HousesCentral Massachusetts, house by house
The houses

The houses

The Colonial

Two full floors, tall rooms, cast iron radiators and a basement with decades of pipe in it. A colonial's trouble is rarely the heat itself. It is everything attached to the old system: the oil tank, the wrapped pipe, the chimney the water heater still uses, and the summer heat nobody planned for. These stories take those one at a time.

Two-story yellow clapboard house with white trim, a center door and rows of windows, snow on the front yard
The Oliver Hutchins House in South Chelmsford, Massachusetts, in winter.