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Services
Five things, written out in full — including the part where we tell you what each one does not do.
Air conditioning
Repair, replacement and new installation. On a repair we charge a flat diagnostic fee to come out and find the cause, and credit it against the work if you go ahead. A free call has to be paid for somewhere, and it usually gets paid for by finding a reason to sell you a system.
On a replacement we size to the house as it is rather than matching whatever was there before. Replacing a four-ton with a four-ton because that is what came out repeats whatever mistake was made the first time — and up here the common mistake is oversizing for the peak hour and then living with short cycles for the rest of the day.
What the quote separates
- The equipment, on its own line
- The ductwork, on its own line, so you can see what it is costing
- Electrical work, if the system needs any
- Permit and inspection
- Removal and disposal of the old equipment
On refrigerant
Refrigerant is not consumed. A system that is low is a system that is leaking. We find the leak or we tell you the coil is finished — we do not sell an annual top-up as a service, because that is selling you the same gas every summer and venting it in between.
Evaporative coolers
An evaporative cooler pulls outside air through a wet pad. The water evaporates, that takes heat out of the air, and the cooled air is pushed into the house. It needs dry air to work and it needs the house open so the air has somewhere to go.
In this valley, for a good part of the summer, that is a very good match — and it is why so many roofs up here still carry one. We service them, repair them, replace them and fit new ones, which is something a lot of contractors have quietly stopped doing.
What it does well
- Cools a house cheaply while the air is dry
- Brings in outside air continuously rather than recirculating
- Simple to maintain, with parts that are still easy to get
What it cannot do
- Work when humidity rises during late-summer moisture — on those days it adds damp and very little cooling
- Cool a closed-up house — it needs windows or a relief vent open
- Filter smoke or fine dust out of the air it brings in
Furnaces & heat pumps
Sized as its own job, because here it is one.
- Gas furnaces
- Still the straightforward answer for a lot of housesA furnace delivers its full output regardless of how cold it is outside, which is the property that matters on the coldest nights of a high-desert winter. Where a house already has gas and sound ductwork, this is usually the least complicated route.
- Heat pumps
- A genuinely good option, with one thing to checkA heat pump both heats and cools with the same equipment. What matters up here, and matters much less down in the basin, is how much heat it still makes on a freezing night — that figure is published for every model and it is the number we look at first.
- Auxiliary heat
- The part nobody explains before the bill arrivesMost heat-pump systems include electric resistance heat as a backup. It works, and it is expensive to run. A system that leans on it every cold morning is a system that was specified without thinking about this valley. We will tell you what triggers it and how to keep it rare.
- Dual fuel
- Heat pump above a set temperature, furnace below itWhere a house has gas and the budget allows, this gets the efficiency of a heat pump through the mild two-thirds of the winter and the certainty of a furnace on the nights that matter. It is more equipment and more money, and we will say when it is not worth it.
- Sizing
- Against the design condition, not against habitHeating load here is real. We calculate it from the house — envelope, glazing, insulation, infiltration — rather than scaling up whatever came out.
Ductwork
On this valley floor the whole duct system usually lives in a vented attic that spends summer afternoons far hotter than the rooms below it and winter nights close to the outside temperature. Both directions cost you.
Every leaking joint is conditioned air paid for and thrown away. Every sag is airflow the last bedroom on the run never receives. Every bare or displaced section of insulation is a heat exchanger working for the attic instead of for you.
It is the least glamorous work we do and, in most houses here, the one that changes the most about how the building feels. It is also the reason we quote duct on its own line — so that when it is sound you can see we are not selling it to you.
- Disconnected and partly disconnected runs
- Sagging and kinked flexible duct
- Leaking plenum and boot connections
- Thin, bare or displaced insulation
- One central return doing the work of three
- Registers throwing air at a wall instead of into the room
Duct cleaning is not one of our services
We repair, seal, insulate and replace duct. We do not sell cleaning as a product, because in most houses it does not fix the complaint that prompted the call. Where we find something that genuinely needs it — rodent contamination, construction debris — we say so and name somebody who does it properly.
Maintenance
Most of California gets away with one annual visit because the heating barely runs. Both of your systems work hard here, in opposite seasons.
Spring — before the summer
- Condenser coil condition, and a proper clean rather than a rinse
- Refrigerant charge measured against the manufacturer's figures
- Condensate drain cleared and tested, and the safety switch checked
- Evaporative cooler, where there is one: pads, pump, float, bleed and belt
Autumn — before the first cold night
- Burners, ignition and flame sensing, or the heat-pump reversing cycle
- Heat exchanger inspected, and the flue checked
- Auxiliary heat strips and their controls, if the system has them
- Evaporative cooler drained, isolated and covered for the freeze
What maintenance will not do
It will not make an undersized system adequate, it will not fix a duct layout that was wrong when it went in, and it will not extend the life of a compressor that is already failing. It keeps a sound system sound and finds problems while they are small. We do not use the visit as a sales appointment.
Not sure which of those you need?
Tell us what the house does and when it does it. That usually settles it on the phone.