One of Many

So thanks to an unseasonably cold week, we had to turn on our heat only to discover....(drum roll please)....a malfunction. We have oil-powered hot water baseboard heating and we think that all the symptoms lead to two possibly unrelated issues:

1.) Several of the baseboards aren't working. Specifically the main floor bathroom and the upstairs bedrooms. The main floor bedrooms, living room, dining room, as well as the upstairs bathroom all are heating, to various degrees. When we had our home inspection, one of the upstairs bedrooms did not have working heat, and the previous owner had an HVAC contractor come in to fix it. The other upstairs bedroom was working, so we know that at least one of the two should be on. Since they're not, we hope that it's something the repairman did and something we can have him refix. We have the receipt for the repairs in our closing packet, and are planning to call the company up and having them send someone out. (Unless, of course, anyone has any suggestions we can try first.)

2.) The heater does not seem to respond to the thermostat. When we finally caved in and turned on the heat, our thermostat read 55 degrees. We set the temperature to 68 and turned on our furnace (up until yesterday, the emergency switch was off). The heat continued all night and this morning, it was 75 on the main floor, where the thermostat is located. It's much cooler upstairs, since the heaters aren't on--per problem 1--but there's no thermostat up there to affect the heat settings. We turned the heat off on the thermostat and the heat was STILL running. The only way to finally turn it off was to flip the emergency switch to the boiler. Our knowledgeable friend told us to try troubleshooting a few things, so we replaced the battery to the thermostat and check the wires, removing one that was linking the heating to the cooling (the thermostat downstairs only controls the heat). No dice. We're going to go to Home Depot today to get a new thermostat and see if that helps, but if not, the probably could apparently be at the boiler end of things. We hope that our service contract with the oil company will cover that...

As always, suggestions are welcome!!