A few posts back I touched briefly [0] on the tradeoffs of buying new appliances. Namely, while you can gain significant improvements in efficiency – meaning less water or natural gas or electricity gets used – retiring the older appliances creates waste. But sometimes you don't have a choice. Last year, our 40-year-old boiler – the thing that burns natural gas to heat the water in our radiant heating – was officially declared dead by no less an authority than Xcel Energy [1], the local utility.

This is far better than someone declaring yours truly [1] and his lovely wife [1] dead, I suppose, which is what I suspect would have happened had we left things as they were.

We first moved into this house [1] a little under three years ago, in the spring, when we had no need for heat. It wasn't until that fall that we noticed the distinct odor of natural gas emanating from our boiler room (which also houses a toilet and our washer and dryer).

Here, neatly camouflaged by a lot of useless laundry room junk, is the general arrangement.

Actually, Hil noticed the stink before I did. Odd but true: Women smell better than men. [2] I mean with their noses. So while Hil was always emitting low-level worry about the gas smell, I happily wandered about, oblivious to asphyxiation’s slow creep.

We brought in a plumber to check it out; he told us it was nothing to worry about. So we didn't, we just assumed it was totally normal to have noxious gases wafting around the house – the small price one pays for being a homeowner. (Aside from the plus-sized mortgage, of course.) When we started our neverending renovation [2], our main bathroom went out of commission, so we started using the laundry/boiler room toilet. Friends and poker-night guests started commenting on the smell. "Nothing to worry about," we told them. “The plumber said so.” And they would give us funny looks, like, "But you’re gonna die!"

Finally – two years later – we called in the gas company, and a technician came out with one of those little gas sensors that beep when they smell gas – a slightly more chipper-sounding Geiger counter. The thing started beeping bloody hell when the tech headed for the laundry room. Turns out the boiler’s burners were cracked and leaking gas, and both the boiler and our water tank had leaking main valves – the thing that modulates how much gas is headed for burning. It was time, the tech told us, to replace the boiler.

If you take another look at this pic...

...you’ll see the big red knob along the gas pipe. That’s where the tech cut off our gas supply. He didn’t ask us, mind you – he said he was required to cut us off. As in, “You’re gonna die if you leave this on, and we don’t want to get sued.” So a little shout-out, if I may, to that first, “no worries” plumber. Thanks dude!

A new boiler ain’t like a new dishwasher – it’s a major purchase, tending more toward the first-car-for-junior end of the family budget. Decent [3] boilers [4] start around $3,000 and quickly lurch upwards [5]. And that’s without installation. The good news is that, since the early 1990s, boilers must be at least 80 percent efficient per federal regulations [6], whereas our boiler was likely burning under 60 percent. Meaning 40 cents of every dollar we spent on heating last year basically went out the chimney. So no matter what we bought, we were going to see some easy – if at first financially difficult – savings on our heating costs and our natural gas usage.

NEXT WEEK: The economics of home energy.