A thing you pay for, cannot see, and can still check
In an old apartment building the boiler is usually the most expensive single object on the property and the one almost nobody has ever laid eyes on. There is a state law about it, an agency that enforces it, an exemption that matters, and one piece of paper a tenant is entitled to go look at today.
Because a building in the news is usually reported as a housing story or a money story, and the thing that actually decides whether people can live in it through a Nebraska January is a mechanical one.
In 2002 the person who runs this site worked at the Rorick, an eleven-story building at 604 South 22nd Street in Omaha — the building now called City View, and the one Omaha put at the top of its first Urban Core Housing Fund list on 2026-08-24. That is written up, with sources, in The Building I Worked In Is Back In The News.
He remembers a radiator the paperwork swore was fixed. That is a memory, and a memory is not a measurement. It is why this page was written; it is not evidence of anything, and no claim below rests on it.
Heat is the one utility a tenant cannot substitute, cannot shop for, and cannot install themselves.
Nebraska has a Boiler Inspection Act — Neb. Rev. Stat. §§ 48-701 through 48-743. Underneath it sits Nebraska Administrative Code Title 229, the Boiler Safety Code.
The program moved. It was run by the Nebraska Department of Labor and, in July 2019, transferred to the Nebraska State Fire Marshal Agency. That matters for a practical reason: search results and old guidance still point at the Department of Labor. If you are looking for a record, look at the Fire Marshal.
| Who | What they hold | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Nebraska State Fire Marshal | The boiler inspection program since July 2019, and the Title 229 Boiler Safety Code | sfm.nebraska.gov |
| The Legislature | The Boiler Inspection Act itself, §§ 48-701 – 48-743 | nebraskalegislature.gov |
| The city | Mechanical and building permits, and code-enforcement complaints about heat | City of Omaha / Douglas County |
| The owner | The capital cost of replacing it, and the certificate on the wall | — private, no public filing required |
Sources: Neb. Rev. Stat. § 48-733, Nebraska Legislature · Nebraska Administrative Code Title 229, Boiler Safety Code (PDF), State Fire Marshal
An inspected boiler carries a certificate of inspection that must be posted in close proximity to the boiler — not filed away downtown, not in a landlord's cabinet. On the wall, by the machine.
You are looking at two things: that it exists at all, and the date on it. Nebraska's Act sets inspection of covered boilers at least once every twelve months. A certificate two years stale is not an accusation of anything — it is a question with a date on it, which is the only kind of question this site asks.
If there is no certificate and no one can tell you where it is, the next call is the State Fire Marshal, not the landlord — the Fire Marshal is the office that holds the program.
Secondary summaries of the Boiler Inspection Act describe an exemption for apartment houses of four units or fewer — steam heating boilers under fifteen pounds per square inch, hot water heating boilers under thirty.
We have not read that in the statute text ourselves.
nebraskalegislature.gov and the Fire Marshal's own pages could not be opened
from the machine this page was built on, so what is above came from secondary
descriptions of the Act, not from § 48-701 et seq. directly.
That is "could not see," not "verified."
This box gets rewritten the day somebody reads the section and reports back — including if the reading contradicts it. The statute is linked in the sources above. If you read it before we do, that is homework too.
Worth saying plainly, and only as arithmetic: a unit-count exemption exempts the smallest buildings. Duplexes, fourplexes and converted houses are a large share of the oldest and cheapest rental stock in Omaha. That is a description of who the line falls on, not a claim that anyone drew it badly — small-building exemptions exist in inspection law everywhere, usually on cost and capacity grounds.
What we do not know, and will not guess: how many Omaha rental units sit on either side of that line. That is a countable number and it is blank below.
The reason this page was proposed is a claim we cannot yet make: that the boiler is the biggest single obstacle in low-income housing. That may well be true. It is not sourced, so it is not printed as a finding. Here is what it would take, all of it free and public.
| The blank | Where the real number lives | Status |
|---|---|---|
| What a boiler replacement costs in an 11-story building | City of Omaha mechanical permit filings — permits carry a stated job valuation | not pulled |
| Whether heat complaints cluster in older buildings | Code-enforcement records, City of Omaha / Douglas County | not pulled |
| Whether boiler prices moved the way water-heater prices did | BLS Producer Price Index — series pinned 2026-09-12, see the box below. Same method as the State Fair debate page, where a water-heater claim was checked against PCU33522033522083 | series identified · values not pulled |
| How many Omaha rental units fall under the four-unit line | Census / county assessor parcel data by unit count | not pulled |
| What City View's own mechanical scope of work is | Permit filings once the Urban Core Housing Fund rehab begins | not filed yet, as far as we know |
The first one a search hands you is the wrong one. The power boiler family (PCU33241…) is industrial and marine plant — not the thing in an apartment basement. The right industry is NAICS 333414, Heating Equipment (except Warm Air Furnaces) Manufacturing.
| Series | What it covers | State |
|---|---|---|
| PCU3334143334141 | Cast iron heating boilers, radiators and convectors (except parts). The closest match for an older Omaha building — it covers the radiators as well as the boiler. | current |
| PCU3334143334145 | Steel heating boilers, 15 psi or less, and all hot water heating boilers (except parts) | DISCONTINUED — data ends June 2014 |
| PCU333414333414 | The whole industry, heating equipment except warm air furnaces. Broader, and the fallback when a product-level series is dead. | current |
| WPU10610106 | The commodity-side view of cast iron heating boilers, radiators and convectors | current |
One of those is worth noticing on its own. The discontinued series, PCU3334143334145, is the one whose title carries the same 15 psi line the Boiler Inspection Act uses — and the public price series for exactly that class of boiler stopped in June 2014. It is not evidence of anything. It does mean that for the boilers closest to the statute's own threshold, there has been no published federal price index for over a decade, and any answer for those has to come from permits and invoices instead.
Values not pulled
The series IDs above are pinned. The numbers in them are not. bls.gov and
FRED could not be opened from the machine this page was built on, so no index value is
printed here. An ID is a pointer; a value needs the source. When the
figures are pulled they arrive with their date, the same as every other number here.
A blank here is a blank on purpose. Five empty rows and an honest account of why beats one confident sentence about what boilers cost. If a number ever appears in a row above, it will arrive with the filing it came from and the date it was pulled.
The first thing the person who runs this site ever wrote about a building was in 2002, about this subject, in a job where nobody had asked him to write anything. That document is not published here and is not offered as evidence. It is why the question got asked in 2026 — which is a different thing from proof, and this site keeps those two things apart on purpose.
Everything above that carries a number carries a source, or says it does not have one yet.
#PROOF · Trust, but verify. Published 2026-09-12. Nebraska. This page names no landlord, no manager and no resident, and alleges nothing against any of them. It describes a law, an agency, an exemption and five things we have not looked up yet.
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