Radiant Floor Heating in Cumberland, Maine

Cumberland Homes and What They Need

Cumberland's housing splits between an old village core and decades of newer subdivisions. Census estimates put the median home at 1984, with about 15 percent built before 1940, in Cumberland Center, on the Foreside and on the older farms of West Cumberland, and another 15 percent built since 2010. Roughly 40 percent went up between 1980 and 2009, the era of the town's many subdivision neighborhoods. About 82 percent of homes are single-family detached. The older farmhouses often have fieldstone foundations, damp basements, knob-and-tube or cloth-sheathed wiring and heating added in stages, while 1990s and 2000s houses are reaching the age when original boilers, furnaces and water heaters come due. Where a house has radiant floor heating, its boiler and mixing controls need periodic attention.

Heating and Cooling in Cumberland

Cumberland has more natural gas than the other towns around it. Census estimates show utility gas heating about 23 percent of occupied homes, a higher share than Falmouth, Cape Elizabeth or Windham, alongside fuel oil or kerosene at about 50 percent, bottled propane at about 12 percent, electricity at about 8 percent and wood at about 3 percent, with solar showing up in about 2 percent. Summit Natural Gas of Maine began building mains here in 2013 under a joint agreement with Falmouth and Yarmouth, and Unitil also lists Cumberland in its territory, but gas mostly follows the denser roads and many homes in West Cumberland remain beyond it. That leaves owners weighing different upgrades: gas conversions and a high-efficiency furnace where a main is at the street, and heat pumps paired with oil or propane backup farther inland, where winter nights run colder than on the Foreside.

Getting to Know Cumberland