installing a radiator

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/ny-bushwick-brooklyn-building-overrun-with-rats-20220404-3jyg3hbpk5gwzl55vcicyqsod4-story.html

jeremy, i have worked in property management for a management firm and my boss was at the top of his game. i have worked for seasoned facilities managers and i have managed repairs and projects in buildings. and of course i now run my own business. the consensus among all of us is that it is cheaper to do something right the first time. I had a budget minded boss (i was the facilities manager, he was the CFO and worried about money) and he said to me “do a temporary fix”; i told him “if i do a temporary fix i will be redoing it in six months and i have not the time and we do not have the money for that”; that was the last time he said that to me. in your case, those may work for now but if those landlords go to sell, potential buyers walk in and see stuff like that on the walls and if they know what they are, they will think “who did this?”. i run into customers now who might try to talk me into a short cut and generally i tell them the truth, it will not last or it will look like poop and i advise them the same and try to work with them to find a proper so lution; that is our job – to advise customers of the correct way to do something and it is our job to source the proper materials and when we know that something else exists that might be wrong to use, we do not show it to them. i have walked away from people who try to nickel and dime a job just because it is not the right way to do it. at this point, those people do not call me because i have developed a reputation for doing this right and the only people who call me now are people who understand that doing something right might be cheaper in the long run (people on limited budgets can still call me for emergency repairs or lock installs). if you make this your mantra, you will developed a high quality clientele. you may develop fewer of them, but they will be a better clientele who understands the value of spending a little more and have the property look right (in this case the proper radiators the plumbers are putting forth). it will pay for you now and the landlords later when they or their children go to sell. i recall people trying to explain this to me when i was younger (like 18) and did not understand it; i only began to understand it about 15 years ago and at this point i can say i like my clientele. it was not always that way.

we have all had to do things that work but do not look right. i have stuff like that in my own house and i sometimes joke with customer’s “if you saw some of the work i have done in my own house, you would not hire me”. my wife says “its the cobbler’s children with no shoes”. most of this stuff is contained to the basement and it is safe but it does not look right. i have also had to put locks on things for customers who were in tight financial situations and were not worried about look but were worried about security. and i have something like that here: i would not go to my basement right now and take a picture of the entrance door with the pushbutton lock on top where the deadbolt should be and the deadbolt where the pushbutton should be and post it here simply because it does not look right and if people do not understand it, they will think i do shoddy work. we keep those to ourselves; if that radiator is safe and legal and your clients would only pay for that one, not the other, the only mistake you made is posting that picture on here.

i cannot wait to read what the plumbers have posted later today.

not sure if i should be encouraged or discourage that my simple question spurred this weird, old man pissing contest :/

randolph: look at the post i made about paint voc’s. i know you are curious so i know you will read both the one in someone else’s post and then the one i posted under it’s own heading.

for most people who do not live and work in this, what i am about to say here will sound like nonsense: last week, after listening to someone tell me about new voc restrictions, i stopped by another contractor’s house after work to talk to him about something. he got a beer out for each of us. we began talking. our common interest is what we do for a living. so we begin talking shop. another beer comes out. we hit the paint voc issue and by the time a third beer comes out the conversation is about the people who make the voc laws and how we won’t be able to do anything right anymore. anyone on this board who had stumbled on us and listened to that conversation for one minute would have thought “these guys sound like idiots, wasting their personal time talking shop about nonsense”.

You call it an old man pissing contest – and you might be correct. But this is how we learned before the internet came along (and even if we did go to the library back whenever, a lot of what real tradesmen knew was not written down in books; you get the basics in books). the old man told the young men things on jobs and it continued after work through stories over cheap american beer (i do not miss those days; last week we were on dark belgian beer). we learned about all sorts of products and other ways of doing things, often through stories about things that went wrong on jobs or with someone putting down what someone else was saying as wrong and then, when we had a problem on a job and no one was around to help us, we knew what might work and we did not have to make the mistake of listening to someone wearing an orange apron ( a lot of times we learned who to go to in a small community; the right retailer or someone else who did what we were doing; people help people back then, the old men especially helped the youth). we also heard stories from people in who had worked in other industries and that gave us the ability to borrow better processes from those industries (say maritime; i grew up by boat builders and listened to them not knowing that one day i would be rebuilding doors and when i really got into the doors i began calling them asking them questions; they are OLD men now).

at the time, i did not understand it. in my post above to jeremy, I mentioned a boss trying to tell me the benefit of doing things right, charging for it, and developing a high quality clientele. i recall looking at him thinking “what good is this doing me now” and i did not appreciate what he had said myself until i was about 40 and realized i had the wrong clients and the only way out of that was to do good work and raise my prices. but i did listen when they taught me how to use tools and they explained WHY we do things during a process (the WHY is very important if you want to understand WHAT you are doing).

there has been a massive generational disconnect in the trades in this country. as a result, we have people walking around calling themselves painters and carpenters and plumbers and they KNOW NOTHING. they have no idea why they are doing the things they are doing and given the chance, they will eliminate very important steps from the process and the result is a job that fails or looks like crap in three years. getting paid has become more important than doing the job; in years past, if you did a good job, you would be rewarded with a better clientele and more money (do good work and the job actually gets easier). this has happen because of many reasons but most importantly a lot of the people doing the work today did not have the benefit of grandfather’s or uncles (old men) teaching them. and now, this generation, they dismiss us wholesale (jeremy is pushing back against this; when i was a kid and did not want to listen to an old man, i kept my mouth shut mostly because i had to because he was standing in front of me) . the customers and the contractors who want to do the right thing are the ones who suffer because we get undersold by people who do not give a crap and the customer learns later, when it is too late (we see it on this board).

i know you think this is an old man pissing contest but i cannot wait to read what the plumbers and heating people are posting, the links. if we listen to people at the top of their game, we learn things from them and understand what sets them apart from the pack.

@Eman @mp wow, did I offend you in any of the above messages?
Do you know that the tenants of the building you cited above waited until the property was sold to a developer before they sued my employer’s client, which was after many years of tenants letting the former mom and pop owners skate by with no such action?
Have ever either of you ever received a stop work order, subcontractor lien, lawsuit, been fired by a client?

@tinker I could tell you horror stories about the mechanicals of the 24 unit building in which the baseboard radiator pic was taken. Former owner installed steel fin radiators in some apartments with pipe diameter bigger at the radiator than at the supply pipe. This made the balance terrible, the water hammer awful, and the air vent leaks damaging. Unfortunately, even building buyers do not catch this stuff. These issues went unnoticed and did not devalue the sale in which my client purchased several years ago. NYC contractors are too often uninformed or are working under proper budget. It makes for some interesting problem solving for me while managing the messes they leave behind. Eccentric bushings were a big help as a temporary band aid on the above heating system until budget allows for replacing non cast iron units with cast iron to better balance the building again like it once was decades ago in a time when people cared more about the work they did than quarterly revenue

Who would’ve seen this coming from the firs post…
Hope you get a Plumber soon! Check back in when you do!

Who would’ve seen this coming from the firs post…
Hope you get a Plumber soon! Check back in when you do!

at any rate…regarding the original OP question… it should cost at most $500 plus the cost of the radiator (typically $2-400 bucks)
jeremy …good luck representing developers trying to push out stabilized tenants… i dont get involved in that creepy stuff…my client base is homeowners trying to improve their heating systems, not their speadsheets

for a plain vanilla install probably $250-300… i generally don’t put radiators on blocks…i use the correct fittings so they rest on the floor

Jeremy: by the looks of things, people working in any of this in this city can be part of the problem or part of the solution. Its our choice.

While it’s really generous of Eman to provide such useful and valuable help, I’d really appreciate it if this thread about heating options would keep going to keep my mind off the actual heat outside. Who’s next?!

So jeremy. I don’t know your market but i have an opinion about that job. When i began this business, i did not understand my market and demgraphics and types of customers. I do now.

I try to cultivate only professionals who see the benefit of doing things right. Those professionals are easier to work for because they know they want it done right and they have the money to do it correctly. Maybe they exist in your field.

None of this means we don’t maybe work for people who need our help but i would not advertise that on this board. I would not post a picture of something that does not look right because a customer is on limited income and had a break in and had me put a cheap lock on a door.

If you put only puctures up of top notch work, you will cultivate top notch clientele and will not leave yourself open to criticism from people who do not understand that maybe the customer’s focus is on the bottom line (unless those people are senior citizens who are honest with me, i try to avoid them). In time, if you are good at what you do, you will find that o nly well healed clients call, me thinks.

In so far as many contractors being under budget here, that is mostly the fault of a certain element of contractor and customer. If we all played by the rules and bid fairly and honestly, the customers would have no choice but to pay. But there is an element of customer who knows there are contractors who do not play by the rules and customers keep shopping until they find them. This is how trash gets dumped on the road running by the park over here where i live. The city has to make up its mind as to whether it wants to enforce the rules across the board or just keep picking on those of us they deem to have money and take responsibility and so long as they pick on those of us who take responsibility, the bottom feeding customers and bottom feeding contractors will still persist.

@tinker I’m happy to give you a tour of a wall mounted baseboard radiator during heating season if you want to see how well and properly they are installed and operate – and to see how beneficial and desirable a low profile radiator can be

Jeremy: you are missing the point a little. I trust it works and as i said i would probably do that in my own basement. But understand there are a class of customers and people (you can include me in that class) who look at something in a building and immediatly spot that it is out of place and immediately make a judgement about the people who do such things. I go through this in my business with customers on limited income when they ask me to make a quick repair with a crappy lock and i am not proud of it. To me, to my professional clients, it would “look” shoddy. To a customer in park slope, the east side of manhattan, or in brooklyn heights, if it looks “shoddy” or out of place, the judgement will stop there, they will not care if it works and they will not care who the rocket scientist is who designed it.

I cannot explain this to you because you did not come up in this and for me to understand it took a very long time of working in it. I did tell you that my boss explained some of this to me when i was probably 16. He did good work. But i did n ot care to understand what he was saying because i was young and naive and never thought it would serve me. When i got out of college, i took a job at a resort condo complex for a management firm. We had an unused guard house at the gate. The board did not want passers by looking in the glass windows. I said “i’ll paint the glass black from the inside”. My boss said the hell you will. Start doing crap like that and the property will look like ….. the answer was cheap mini blinds. My boss was a pro. He did not want the place to look like slum lords ran it, to use mp’s term.

I bet you have the management side of your business down well. You probably did great in college and communicate well and know how to talk to a board or owners and manage the money. But you did not come up in this – you sound like i did when i would try to save money at the cost of everything else on the proprty. It took like 3 years of working in the maintenance side of this for professional managers for me to really get it – that part of managing the property is making it look like it all belongs in place as well as work right and understand how that contibutes to the value of the asset and community. And your insistance at pushing back at people who are much older and more experienced, it makes you sound like i was when i was just out of college and thiught i knew it all when really i had no understanding as to what was going on; now i know i was simply naive and had a lot to learn.

I am not saying do not take jobs where money is the overriding factor. I help people all the time who have both money problems and door problems. But for the sake of my business and the clientele i really want to work for, i don’t post pictures of that work on the internet. By keeping the shoddy looking stuff hidden, you will get fewer calls from people who want shoddy work and more calls from people who want good work and life will get easier.

I have suffered the headaches where money is the overriding factor and those prople do not understand that they are their own worst enemy. It is a mindset.

i just wanted advice on moving a radiator so that i can put my desk in the corner of the room?

Randolph. We want people who work in this city to strive to make it better for all of us.

cool – still not a great excuse to hijack my thread, but carry on as you wish i guess.

Sorry randolph. But the plumbers came on here and beat jeremy up without offering him any reason why doing something that does not look right might be bad for everyone. In truth, honest contractors hate bad actors (working in an environment where short cuts are taken and laws are broken makes it hard for conscientous people who want to do the right thing). I believe jeremy is a good actor who can be a better actor with some perspective. The opportunity availed itself and i took it.

I understand you and look forward to your one liners. They get right to the point.