Heat Pump Maintenance in South Portland, Maine

South Portland Homes and What They Need

South Portland's housing is younger than Portland's but still old: census estimates put the median home at 1968, about a quarter of units date from before 1940, and roughly six in ten were built before 1980. A noticeable bump in the 1940s reflects the wartime shipyard years already noted on this page. About half of homes are single detached houses and about a quarter of units are in buildings of five or more apartments, and close to six in ten households own. The older grid neighborhoods such as Ferry Village, Knightville and Meetinghouse Hill hold modest capes and two-story houses on small lots, with later subdivisions filling in the rest of the city. Houses from the 1940s and 1950s can still have small 60- or 100-amp services, ungrounded circuits and galvanized supply lines, so plumbing work in a South Portland cape often turns up aging pipe once walls are opened.

Heating and Cooling in South Portland

Heating fuel in South Portland is close to a three-way split. Census estimates show about 38 percent of occupied homes on fuel oil or kerosene, about 34 percent on utility gas and about 18 percent on electricity, with bottled propane near 5 percent. Unitil's Northern Utilities serves the city, so gas is available on many streets but not all. The whole city sits on Casco Bay and the Fore River, and the Jetport runway is inside city limits, so the official Portland weather record is effectively local: January lows average in the mid-teens and nights at or below zero come about ten times a winter. Wind off the water drives heat loss in older, loosely built houses. Many owners of oil-fired homes are adding ductless mini-splits in South Portland to cut oil use while keeping the existing system for the coldest stretches.

Getting to Know South Portland