A heating and cooling company that started in a boiler room
Empire City Air Care began in the basement of a Washington Heights co-op, where founder Dennis Marchetti worked as the live-in superintendent for fourteen years. The job taught him the lesson this company is built on: in New York buildings, the apartment is where a heating or cooling problem shows up, and the boiler room is where it started. Radiators knock for reasons. Boilers short-cycle for reasons. A through-wall unit that sweats and rattles is telling you something specific. Dennis founded the company in 2016 to do that work from the other side of the basement door, for the small buildings and owner-occupied homes that big service contracts pass over.
Who we work for
This company serves the part of New York that can actually say yes to a repair: owners of brownstones and small multifamily buildings, co-op and condo owners responsible for their own systems, and small landlords who carry their own boiler rooms. That focus is deliberate. A tenant in a large managed tower needs the building's own staff and contracts; a co-op owner with a dead PTAC, or a four-family owner whose boiler quit on a Sunday, needs a company that knows the building stock and answers its phone. If your building's staff handles its systems under contract, we will say so plainly and point you back to them.
How the work runs here
Every call starts with the building's account of itself: what knocked, what cycled, which line of radiators went cold, when the sleeve unit started to sweat. Access is planned before the visit, not discovered at the door, including who lets the crew in, whether a freight elevator needs reserving, and who in the building can approve the work once the problem is found. Heat that knocks. Cooling that answers. That is the standard the schedule is kept to, in January and in July alike.
The crew
Dennis still walks boiler rooms on the first visit to a new building. Priya Natarajan runs the cooling schedule; she spent years changing out PTAC and through-wall units across a forty-building portfolio for a property management firm, and she plans a building's access the way other companies plan parts. Tom O'Connell runs heating; twenty years on steam and hydronic systems in the Bronx taught him to hear a failing trap from the stairwell. Three people who learned this trade inside New York buildings, working on New York buildings.
Start with the estimate
Every job here begins the same way: a free, hassle-free, no-obligation estimate, with the findings stated plainly before any work is agreed. Call Call for same-day help or write to [email protected], Monday through Saturday, 7am to 7pm.