To Pay Or Not To Pay?

In my Leap Day post, I hinted at a problem with our heat. We've known for a long time that our house heats unevenly. Half of the house barely gets any heat at all--the pipes carrying the hot water from the furnace to one side never get warm. We thought this problem would clear up when we insulated our house better, because the cold side is also the side over the crawl space. We figured that the reason the water was cold by the time it hit those rooms was because the pipes were uninsulated and basically outside, so the water cooled off by the time it got where it needed to go.

Having been through a winter post-insulation, we can now conclude that is not the case. So the problem is clearly in our actual heating system.

Now the whole system is unreliable at best--we have toasty warm rooms in our living room, dining room, and master bedroom usually but even these rooms (actually mostly just the master bedroom) have moments of chill. When that happens, D bleeds the pipes until he doesn't notice any more bubbles, and that usually clears up the problem.

But the bad rooms mostly don't work at all. D can bleed the pipes until there is no noticeable air but the water is always cold (sometimes on a good day, it is tepid). So this winter we finally called in our local heating company and asked them to solve the problem. They came out twice and still seem a little confused, but here's what they think will solve the problem:

After emptying our pressure tank, trying to bleed sections of the house, and after considering our furnace and pipe structure, the folks at our local mom and pop place believe the piping down near our furnace is wacky. They were unable to effectively bleed our system and believe there are bubbles trapped permanently in unreachable places. Now I might have the fundamentals wrong here, but what they seem to be saying is that the release valve (red arrow) is in a section that leads to the outside water source. But it should be in the section that goes from the furnace to the house (blue arrow). This bad placement is what is not allowing them to bleed our system. So they want to reroute some pipes to make a full system bleed possible.

They also want to install an auto-bleeder which would automatically pull out air bubbles from the water that passes through it.

The problem is that the company admits that they are guessing the solution. And there is no guarantee that they're right and that doing what they recommend will fix the problem. And it's not cheap ($800). But at least they are being completely up front with us.

This company has not charged us a dime to come out all these times and take a look. They also didn't charge us two years ago when we called them and asked for help when our heat wouldn't stop running (they serviced the heating system for the previous owner and we had his work records, so that's why we called them). This company is the kind of place where, if it where called Smith Heating, the people who came out to see us would be Bob Smith and Mike Smith. They are really nice and I don't think they are trying to rip us off.

However, that's enough money that we thought we should get a second opinion. We called a bunch of other places. All of them have either said that they don't service baseboard heating or that they would charge us about $200 just to come take a look (creditable, of course, towards follow-up service).

So this giant post all boils down to two questions: Do we pay for a second opinion (and possibly a third and a fourth opinion, if they all disagree)? Or do we pay to get the work done? (A third, off-the-wall question is do we pay even more for some crazy solution that involves replacing our entire heating system?)

(Either way we probably won't do anything until September, so that we won't have to wait months to turn the heat on and see if it worked...)