Toro Plumbing & Mechanical, LLC.

12/07/2025

$42/hour starting pay for experienced and talented junior mechanics. Paid holidays, sick days, training seminars, and much more. Please be presentable and have a résumé listing your experience in the field.
Contact information on our website at www.HeyToro.com

12/03/2025

08/11/2025

Well, these Toro guys certainly have their work cut out for them. Over the next two days, our installers will eliminate the bad piping job done by the previous contractors 20 years ago and create a proper steam boiler header and distribution main.
The resulting over-used, short-cycling boiler is already at the recycling facility and the new cast iron unit is in place to be installed.
New electronics. New safety controls. New warranty.
Heating a large home with steam can be complicated and it’s not for every plumber, nor is it in the skill set of today’s typical HVAC tech. Steam heating is its own category, and good steam heating technicians are in a class by themselves.
Let Toro Plumbing & Mechanical, LLC (Gateway Plumbing and Heating in NYC) heat your home with safe, clean, efficient steam this coming season.
Call 973-672-1000 to make an appointment.

08/06/2025

One proactive homeowner had us install a new boiler in their newly refurbished mechanical room yesterday. Beating the rush that will inevitably start in a handful of weeks is the right thing to do.

05/10/2025

Residential heating devices, like steam and hot water boilers, are not designed to work with 100% reliability because that would make their cost too high. Rather, they are designed to work with practical reliability and a failure rate mitigated by methodical inspections and periodic repairs.
Boilers and HVAC devices of all kinds tend to follow what engineers call a bathtub curve of service life which, when tracked on a graph, looks like an up-facing crescent or “bathtub” starting high on the ends with a stretch of low incidence between them. In the absence of a visual representation we can explain that unexpected failures tend to occur at the outset of their being placed into service, then at typical intervals for several years, and again as the equipment begins to age and show signs of wear and extended usage.

For at least this reason, we tend to urge our customers not to wait for autumn or worse, winter, to execute proposals to replace their home heating equipment.
That said, if we gave you a boiler replacement quote in the past 12 months which you did not act on, we’re going to offer you a break.
Any reputable heating company knows the struggle of keeping up with the demand of its community as summer starts to wind down. For this reason, moving some of September’s boiler replacements to this year’s spring is a favor we do for ourselves as much as our client base.

If you’re holding an unexecuted proposal of ours on which you’ve procrastinated, give us a call or an email and we’ll make it worth it for you to do the work in the next 60 days. We understand your concern about installing a boiler that may go unused for several months once in place and so we’re going to offer additional warranty coverage on these jobs to last through September 2026.

Holding a proposal from another company? We can take a look at that too.

03/24/2025

Electric water heaters tend to last longer than gas-fired heaters. This one is still heating after 16 years but it's starting to show signs of pitting and rusting through the jacket. The next thing that's going to happen is a full-on leak.
This new owner understands and is taking the preventative measure of having the tank replaced, which is a good thing since in our efforts to change it we discovered none of the shutoff valves work anymore. That would've been an interesting discovery during a flood.
So, now we've scheduled a shutdown with NJ American Water and will install new modern style shutoff valves in accessible locations for this homeowner's peace of mind.

01/26/2025

Are you going through lots of water in your steam heating system? Underground piping (if you've got any) leaks could very well be your problem. This basement had to be excavated to find, reroute, and replace the 130-year old pipe. But now it's done for something like forever.
Excessive water use in steam heating presents a problem for the boiler. All the lost water must be replaced for the boiler to continue running and make heat. Unfortunately, "new" water is saturated with fresh oxygen which is corrosive to the cast iron of the boiler. Fresh water in small amounts is diluted with the existing "dead" water and does not cause significant corrosion but in large amounts makes quick work at eating away at the boiler's cast iron sections and iron return piping.
Some folks, when faced with having to manually add water more frequently than they're used to will decide to install an automatic water feeder as a fix. That's not what those feeders are for though. They will serve very well to mask this problem but of course do nothing to cure it. I like automatic water feeders very much for other reasons but I also like tight heating systems that go through water at an expected and typical rate of usage. An automatic water feeder with a digit counter (pictured) does a great job of helping track all this.

12/22/2024

This home has 37 zones of hydronic (circulating hot water) heat with 9,000 square feet of radiant floor heating and a small number of perimeter radiators.
The maintenance kit for these boilers costs me $1,500 each and there are two of them to buy. It takes our team 3-4 hours to perform the annual service. We installed this system 10 years ago and it’s operated something close to flawlessly since then because we keep an eye on it and the owners pay for an annual service contract that has us in the house at least 4x per year.

And you thought you had expenses.

Happy holidays, all.

12/18/2024

Leaving a 40-year old boiler in place only seems like a good idea. A modern boiler employs integrated modern safety devices to keep carbon monoxide out of your home. It’s also not uncommon to gain 10 or more efficiency points when replacing an old boiler with a new one. are the reasons to make the call to Toro today for an overdue upgrade to the way you heat your home.

10/08/2024

Most steam heating systems were designed in the early 20th century largely in response to the 1918 Influenza pandemic. The airborne illness brought to light the need for a safe, automatically operated, comprehensive heating system to warm every room of a residence while providing ventilation through partially opened windows. Back then, the contractors, engineers, and boiler and radiator manufacturers of the day needed a term to express what quantity and size of radiators could be connected to a boiler to produce an effective result. The term would be used to express both the size of radiator for each room and the output of each boiler size and model. The measurement came to be called a “square foot of Equivalent Direct Radiation”, or EDR, and that’s the term manufacturers use this very day to express the potential output of a modern steam boiler or radiator.
Installing steam in a home or building back then was considered to be a very technical job that rarely fell to anyone other than highly-qualified engineers and installers who were committed to safety and limiting installation costs by carefully calculating all pipe diameters, radiators, and boiler sizes.
Today it’s an installer’s job to match the EDR output of a replacement boiler to the system’s ability to process that steam safely, effectively, and efficiently. The sum of the EDR of all the radiators in the home or building tells us the EDR output of the boiler we need to install.
Mismatching the boiler and collection of radiators creates all manner of lingering problems: banging pipes, hissing air vents, high fuel bills, unnecessary fuel usage, unbalanced heating, frequent boiler failures, and more.
There are some exceptions to this process but they are few and far between. If a potential boiler installer is not doing an EDR calculation in your home or cannot show you the proper math upon request then your replacement boiler size was probably a guess and may not be the most efficient choice for your home.

08/21/2024

If I haven’t spoken to you at the Toro office, I am Melissa. I manage scheduling, customer service, billing, and marketing for Toro Plumbing & Mechanical.

Oh, I am also the wife of “Johnny Cataneo” who posts here often 🙂

We recently bought and renovated a home. While John is a highly experienced tradesman, it was a difficult process. We made mistakes along the way, but we are very happy with our new master bath.

The original layout included a pedestal sink and fiberglass shower enclosure. A gut renovation was unavoidable. While John and the Toro team repaired/replaced the old pipes, I wanted to modernize the look and utilize every inch of space.

We removed the shower enclosure and built a wall-to-wall shower stall. The dark gray/black tile contrasts a complimentary black and tan accent wall adding dimension. John moved the shower body to an inside wall for pipe insulation. The volume control maintains water temperature effortlessly and the shower spray is so useful. The bath and lighting fixtures are brass. The 2 x 2” floor tile matches the walls. The built-in niche holds my many products keeping bottles off the floor.

The oak-like vanity has a cabinet, drawers, and open shelf for various storage needs. The outlet in the cabinet eliminates unsightly cords for hair dryers, etc. The medicine cabinet is lined with mirrors, including a magnifying make-up mirror and a lot of glass shelving. I am in love with this storage workhorse.

I used the same shower tile for the main floor and John added radiant heat which is a cozy treat.

The black and gold large palm leaf pattern highlights the brass fixtures. I chose the largest brass semi-flush ceiling fixture I could fit for a bit of drama, a high hat in the shower, and a brass LED fixture above the mirror.

We worried the space would feel too closed with the dark colors, but the we are thrilled with the results.

08/20/2024

Too many failed or overwhelmed sump pumps to deal with today. Please consider a backup pump of some kind. In my own home, I installed a water powered pump in addition to the electric. It has saved the contents of my basement on at least two occasions that I know of. The first time I had to carry out my flooded washer and dryer I knew I couldn't live without something additional.