It's so interesting to see this on Hacker News. Through the bizarre strange fortune of life I'm the owner of a mediocre building built in the late 1800s located in an old mining boom town. It has a very robust steam heating system in place but the town is absolutely in the middle-of-nowhere. The cost of getting someone to just look at the pipes is about $200, not to mention any work. Paid three different people to look at it and nobody knew up from down, got 3 radically different opinions on what should be done.

After a ridiculous amount of searching and reading, I've come to find that basically nobody knows what they're talking about on the subject. The advice online and in person essentially amounts to witchcraft. I noticed people using the same adjectives/verbs to describe steam-heating that sellers of essential oils use. Finding Dan Holohan's website was like finding a miracle. Steam heating is so simple and efficient but it was done in an era when documentation and standardization was more nonexistent than today. If you sit down and draw diagrams and think about the system you have in your house it becomes so simple... but without that hour of logic and shaping of the problem you get no where fast. It was such a good 'back to the basics' experience for me that I wouldn't trade for my doctorate degree.