The following winter I was back in his office, and we were having the same conversation. The steam traps on most of the radiators were still shot - worse than ever, in fact, now that another winter had passed. The fuel bills continued to climb, and the water hammer had done away with the need for alarm clocks in the tenants' apartments. "How much will we save if we replace all the steam traps," he, like a single-minded lawyer, asked again.

"I can't say," I insisted.

"Why not?"

"Too many variables in a building such as this," I explained again.

"There has to be a way to put a dollar amount on it," he insisted.

We tried to do that in the Seventies. It didn't work." He shook his head in disgust, and again we left it like that for a year.

This went on for four years before they finally decided they couldn't stand the water hammer and the exorbitant fuel bills anymore. They changed the steam traps and solved most of their heating problems. They also saved money, but I was glad I hadn't given them a dollar amount. I had no way of knowing what would happen in this building, or any other steam heated building.

I wasn't always this way, though. During the oil embargo of the early Seventies, just about everyone involved in the energy business in New York City jumped either on the replacement window or radiator steam trap bandwagon. The window people had better luck at predicting the future.

Which is not to say that the steam trap people didn't try their luck with the old crystal ball. I remember very well those incredible payback predictions. It was so easy to do in those days! We'd just looked at the size of an orifice in a typical thermostatic steam trap and figure the blow-through at five-psi steam pressure. Then we'd equate the wasted steam to the high rates the Utility charged for city steam and there you had it! With a half-inch thermostatic radiator trap, the payback period was about a week. It was even less (something like 48 hours) if you used replacement parts and kept the old trap bodies in place. If you acted quickly enough, the Utility wound up owing you money.