HVAC, Plumbing & Electrical in Francestown, NH

A hill town at the headwaters of the Piscataquog

Francestown sits 25 miles west of Manchester in the Hillsborough County hill country, 30 square miles of woods, old farm road and pond, with the village common near 900 feet and the 2,066-foot summit of Crotched Mountain in the town's high corner. Surface water runs to the Merrimack by way of the Piscataquog, whose Middle Branch starts at Scoby Pond, the water older maps call Haunted Lake. About 1,600 people live in the town Governor Wentworth named for his wife Frances in 1772, nearly all on their own well and septic, and that changes what a heating, plumbing or electrical call involves.

Oil, propane and wood, and a January that tests all three

Heating in Francestown is fuel-fired and it is not close. Oil warms roughly 47 percent of homes in town and propane another 24 percent, with about 94 households burning wood. No natural gas main runs up Route 136 or Route 47, so an oil boiler, a propane furnace or a wood stove is the entire plan.

January here averages a low near 14 degrees and drops below zero most winters, and on the Crotched Mountain side of town the cold settles in longer than it does down in the Merrimack valley. We service oil and propane equipment before the season rather than during the first hard freeze, and size replacements to a real heat-loss calculation instead of matching the tag on the old unit. On these back roads a delivery truck is your only supply chain, so tank, line and venting work gets done right.

Heat pumps in houses built around a soapstone stove

Francestown homes run from 1774 to last year, and many predate ductwork. The nine houses in the Old County Road South Historic District went up between 1774 and 1806, and this is the town that quarried soapstone from 1792 until 1912 because the stone held heat in a hearth. Plaster and hand-framed bays like that do not take kindly to a duct chase.

Cold-climate ductless mini-splits are the honest answer. They hold real output well below freezing, mount without gutting a Federal-era wall, and in July pull humidity out of rooms that never had air conditioning. On newer builds we pair a heat pump with the existing oil or propane system so the fuel-fired side only carries the coldest nights.

Well water straight out of New Hampshire granite

Outside the small Francestown Village Water Company service area, this town is on private wells and private septic, with no municipal treatment plant behind either. Those wells are drilled into the same bedrock the town once quarried, and that bedrock is the problem. Statewide, roughly one in five private wells tests above the 10 ppb arsenic standard and about a quarter of bedrock wells carry radon at or above 10,000 pCi/L. Neither has a taste, color or smell to warn you.

Francestown wells also pull iron and manganese that stain fixtures, and hardness that scales a water heater from the inside. We test your well rather than working off a neighbor's report, then build what the results call for: aeration or carbon for radon, adsorption media for arsenic, softening and filtration for the rest.

Well pumps, pressure tanks and unheated cellars

A Francestown home on a well carries plumbing town-water houses never deal with: a submersible pump down the bore, a pressure tank and switch, and often a long supply run out to a barn or a farmhouse ell. Those runs are where January finds you, because the old ells and stone-walled cellars along Main Street and Old County Road hold cold, and a line in an unheated bay can split before anything upstairs registers a problem.

We reroute or insulate those runs, add heat trace where a reroute is not practical, replace failed pumps and waterlogged pressure tanks, and set frost-proof hydrants so the barn spigot does not flood your cellar in March.

Two and a half centuries of wiring under one roof

Francestown and neighboring Bennington each hold 35 properties on the New Hampshire State Register, more than any other town in the state, and that heritage comes with wiring history. It is common here to find knob-and-tube in the oldest section of a house, cloth-wrapped circuits from a mid-century update, and a 100-amp panel or a fuse box trying to carry a home that now runs a well pump, a heat pump, a septic pump and a car charger.

On a well, an electrical problem is a water problem, because that pump circuit is all that stands between the house and no running water. We upgrade services to a safe 200 amps, replace outdated wiring with routing that spares plaster and original trim, put the well and septic pumps on dedicated circuits, and handle the permit and inspection.

When the line into town goes down

Francestown is fed by long, tree-lined rural distribution, and December 2008 made the point: that ice storm produced the largest outage the state utility had ever faced, and crews had to clear roads before they could reach poles in hill towns like this one. Out here an outage is not just darkness: no power means no well pump, so no water and no toilets, and if the boiler is down too the house heads toward frozen pipes inside a day.

A standby generator running on the propane a quarter of this town already stores starts on its own when the line drops and carries the heat, the well pump and the freezer until a utility truck gets up the hill.

One call instead of five

The oil boiler tune-up, the mini-split, the arsenic and radon treatment, the well pump, the 200-amp service and the standby generator come from one licensed, veteran-owned team out of our Manchester branch at 201 Allard Drive, 25 miles east of the Francestown common. Same-day service where we can get it, permits pulled, inspections handled, and a lifetime workmanship guarantee behind all of it.

What we get called for in Francestown

The work that comes up most around here. Same team, same guarantee, whichever one you need.

• Water Treatment - Cleaner, safer water for your whole home.
• Generator Install - Keep your home powered no matter what.
• Boiler Repair - Restore heat fast with reliable service.
• Heat Pumps - Repair or replace modern heat pumps.
• Furnace Repair - Restore heat fast with reliable service.
• Panel Upgrades - Boost home power and improve safety.
• Oil-to-Gas Conversion - Upgrade your home to use modern, efficient fuel.
• Water Heaters - Repair or replace tank and tankless units.

Worth reading before you call us in Francestown

Our own research, sourced and dated, on the problems that come up around here.

• What's Really In Your Tap Water (And What You Can Do About It)Your municipal treatment plant was built to solve 20th-century problems. The list of things that end up in the water supply has changed a lot since then. Here is what the research actually says, and what you can do about it at your own house.
• PFAS: The Forever Chemicals In Your WaterNearly half of U.S. tap water contains PFAS, the federal deadline just moved to 2031, and four of the six regulated compounds are proposed for rescission. Here is what that actually means in New Hampshire, Maine and New Jersey - and what removes them.
• Chlorine Byproducts: When the Cure Creates the ProblemChlorination is one of the great public health achievements of the last century and I am not going to argue against it. But the chlorine reacts with organic matter in the water and makes something else - and your hot shower is a bigger exposure route than your drinking glass.
• Microplastics: What We Know and What We Do NotMicroplastics are in tap water, bottled water, food, air, and human blood and placental tissue. The WHO says current levels do not appear to pose a health risk. Both of those statements are true. Here is how to hold them at the same time.

We also serve near Francestown

Same team, same guarantee, a short drive away. Find your town for the local details.

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• Weare, NH
• Hancock, NH