Overtown is one of the oldest neighbourhoods in Miami, laid out on the blocks north-west of downtown between NW 8th and NW 20th Street. Its buildings run from early twentieth-century wood-frame cottages, many of them one room wide, to mid-century apartment blocks and the mid-rise infill of the last decade.
Three kinds of building, three kinds of closet
In a cottage the heater is often at the very back, in a lean-to off the rear steps or a cupboard opening from the kitchen, and reaching it means walking the length of the house. In the mid-century blocks the unit sits in a hallway closet shared with the air handler, and on a riser that serves the flats above and below. In the newer buildings it moves into a chase or an attic, where a slow leak shows up as a stain on a ceiling rather than water on a floor.
What an older cottage asks for
Wood-frame houses of that age have their own pattern. The heater circuit may have been added after the fact and run in surface conduit. The floor beneath the unit may be raised timber rather than a slab, so a leaking tank soaks into joists before it reaches the ground. The vent may climb an interior chase to a roof jack nobody has looked at in years, and the clearances around it are worth measuring before anything is ordered.
Access is the other constraint. Many lots have a narrow drive or none at all, so a tank comes in by hand from the street, and street parking near a job is limited enough that the delivery and the visit are usually timed together. Permits come from the City of Miami.
Start on the contact page. Say whether the property is a house, a walk-up or one of the newer blocks, and whether the unit is gas or electric, so the visit is planned for the right building.