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Services
Five things. Sold as one package where it makes sense, and written out here including what each one does not cover.
Air conditioning
Repair and replacement. Diagnostic first, quote second, and sized against the house you will have rather than the house you have now.
On a repair, a flat diagnostic fee brings a technician out to find the cause and take readings, credited against the work if you go ahead. We charge it because a free call has to be paid for somewhere, and it usually gets paid for by finding a reason to sell a system.
On a replacement, the sizing conversation is where this business is different. Cooling equipment is chosen against a calculated load, and that load is a property of your building — insulation, air leakage, duct. If the attic work is happening anyway, the load goes down and so does the machine. We run the calculation both ways and show you both numbers.
What the quote separates
- Equipment
- Ductwork
- Air sealing and insulation
- Permit, inspection and disposal
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 will not sell you an annual top-up, because that is selling the same gas every summer and venting it in between.
The uncomfortable part
Doing this in the right order sometimes means we sell you a smaller, cheaper machine than the company before us quoted — on the same house, for the same result.
That is not a trick and it is not a discount. It is what happens when the building is fixed before the equipment is chosen, and it is the reason we look at the attic first.
Ductwork
Cooled air has to travel through the hottest space in the building to get to you. Everything that leaks out of it on the way was paid for.
In a north Orange County tract house the whole duct system lives in a vented attic. On a summer afternoon that attic is far hotter than the rooms below it, so a leaking joint is not just lost air — it is lost air replaced by attic air, pulled back into the system through whatever gaps exist on the return side.
The work is unglamorous: seal the joints properly with mastic rather than tape that lets go in attic heat, support the runs so they are not kinked, insulate what is bare, and add return air where one hallway grille is doing the work for four closed bedroom doors.
What we fix up there
- Disconnected and partly disconnected runs
- Sagging, kinked and crushed flexible duct
- Leaking plenum and boot connections
- Bare or displaced duct insulation
- One return doing the work of three
- Registers throwing air at a wall
Duct cleaning is not one of our services
We seal, insulate, support, rebuild and replace ductwork. 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.
Attic insulation & air sealing
The part that makes everything else work, and the reason this business exists in the shape it does.
- Air sealing
- First, alwaysClosing the gaps where the house connects to its attic: duct boots, recessed lights, wiring and plumbing penetrations, the attic hatch, and the top plates of interior walls. Insulation slows heat moving through a surface. It does almost nothing about air moving through a hole.
- Insulation
- Second, and to a specified depthBlown or batt, depending on the attic. The quote states the depth and the crew marks it with depth rulers so you can check it afterwards — which you should, because settled or thin coverage is very hard to see from a hatch.
- The hatch
- Usually the worst square metre in the buildingAn uninsulated, unsealed hatch is a direct opening between a conditioned hallway and a very hot attic. It is cheap to fix and almost nobody does it.
- Ventilation
- Sealing the ceiling is not sealing the roofThe attic still needs to breathe. We check that intake and exhaust are present and roughly in balance before adding insulation, because blocking soffit vents with fresh insulation is one of the most common ways this work goes wrong.
- What we do not do
- Walls, floors, crawlspaces or spray foamWe do attic insulation and attic air sealing, because that is the part that interacts with the HVAC system. For wall insulation or a foam roof deck, you want a specialist and we will say so.
Heat pumps
A mild winter is the condition a heat pump is best at, which makes north Orange County one of the easier places in the country to put one in.
One machine heats and cools. We will raise it on most replacement quotes rather than waiting to be asked, because in this climate the argument is genuinely strong.
What we will not do is push you into one. If your furnace is sound, your duct is good and only the cooling has failed, "keep the furnace" is a perfectly respectable answer and it is cheaper. We say it regularly.
The one thing worth knowing: a heat pump generally moves a larger volume of gentler air than a furnace does. Ductwork that was marginal for a furnace will be noisy and uneven with a heat pump — which is another reason the duct is on its own line before you choose the equipment.
What we will not quote
A savings figure. Not a percentage, not a payback period, not for a heat pump and not for insulation.
It depends on your rate plan, your house and how you live in it. What we will give you is the load calculation before and after the work, which is a real number about your building rather than a forecast about your bill.
Maintenance
Once a year, booked for spring rather than for the week everybody else discovers a problem.
The visit
Condenser and evaporator coils, condensate drain cleared and tested, refrigerant charge measured against the manufacturer's figures, electrical connections checked and torqued, blower and filter.
While we are up there
A look at the duct and at the insulation depth. Both settle, both get disturbed by other trades, and both are much easier to find in April than in August.
The report
Written up with photographs of anything we want you to see. If there is nothing to report, the report says so — and the visit is not used as a sales appointment.
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 still small.
Not sure which of those you need?
Tell us which room, what time of day, and roughly when the house was built. That usually settles it on the phone.