Stone houses and postwar infill
Wynnewood grew in two waves. The first, between about 1890 and 1920, brought stone houses for middle-class families on the tree-lined streets the town is still known for. The second came after 1945, when the last farms gave way to new houses. The two waves need different things. The early houses were built around a boiler and radiators; the later ones were more often built with ductwork, which means furnaces, central air and heat pumps.
English Village
Tucked off Montgomery Avenue between Cherry Lane and Wister Road, English Village is a courtyard of 29 Tudor Revival homes from the late 1920s, some of them semi-detached. It became a local historic district in 2010, so exterior changes visible from a public way go before Lower Merion’s architectural review board when a permit is pulled. For heating and cooling that mostly means the outdoor unit: placed at the back and out of view, it usually isn’t reviewed. We plan for that before we quote.
Keeping the boiler, adding cooling
Plenty of Wynnewood owners love their radiator heat and just want air conditioning. That’s a reasonable combination. An air handler in the attic can cool the top floor through short duct runs, with the outdoor unit placed where it’s easy to reach for service. Because the air handler sits above finished ceilings, its condensate drain matters: the coil pulls water out of the air all summer, and a clogged drain line can leave a stain on the bedroom ceiling below. Flushing the drain and testing its safety switch each spring prevents that. Cooling the lower floors of a stone house is a bigger job, since ducts need a route behind plaster and stone, and we’ll tell you plainly whether your house has the room. The boiler keeps doing what it does well.
When the radiators knock
Knocking and banging in a steam system sounds alarming, but in Wynnewood’s older stone houses it’s usually water trapped in a pipe that has lost its pitch, or a radiator that isn’t draining back to the boiler. Neither means the boiler is failing. Finding the spot and correcting it is ordinary repair work, and it makes the house quieter and the heat more even.
Postwar systems reaching retirement
Many of the furnaces and central air systems in Wynnewood’s postwar houses have been replaced at least once, and some are due again. When both are near the end at the same time, a heat pump that handles heating and cooling is worth pricing next to a new furnace and AC. As of September 2026, PECO offers up to $300 back on a qualifying ENERGY STAR air source heat pump for electric customers.