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Houses
Some that have been in one family for forty years, some that change hands every four. Both arrive with no written history.
Find it, identify it, write it down
Before anything is diagnosed or quoted, we walk the house and find everything: the outdoor units, the furnace or air handler wherever it has been hidden, any ductless heads, the thermostats, the drains and the shut-offs. Then we photograph the rating plates and record model and serial numbers.
The serial number generally encodes a manufacture date, which gives you a reliable floor for the equipment’s age even when nobody alive knows when it went in. A permit record at the city usually supplies the installation date and often the installer. Between those two, most houses can be dated to within a year.
That document takes a morning and it is the thing the house has never had.
Six things
The safety pass
On any gas appliance nobody has looked at in years: combustion tested and recorded, heat exchanger inspected, flue and combustion air checked as installed. This is the part that does not wait.
No cooling, no heat
Checked in order of cost. Capacitors, contactors, float switches, filters, thermostats and breakers before anything expensive is discussed.
Condensate
Primary drain, secondary pan and float switch, tested. On a house that has been empty or lightly used, drains are the first thing to have quietly blocked.
Duct and airflow
Leakage and static pressure measured, so a keep-or-replace decision is made on numbers rather than on the age printed on a plate.
Ductless
For rooms that were never served properly, and for houses where adding duct would mean altering a building somebody cares about.
Replacement
Sized from the house as it is now, permitted and tested — and only after we have said plainly whether the existing equipment genuinely warrants it.
Worth hearing before anybody condemns anything
Age is not a fault
A twenty-year-old system that has been maintained, is correctly charged and moves the air it should is not a problem waiting to happen. It is an old system that works. We will tell you what the measurements say rather than what the date says.
But a cracked heat exchanger is
There is one finding on which we will not be relaxed. A gas appliance with a compromised heat exchanger or a failing flue is a carbon monoxide risk today, and it is the one thing on this page that overrides every other consideration including cost.
Empty houses fail differently
A house that has sat unused has its own set: dry traps, blocked drains, seized dampers, a thermostat with dead batteries, and occasionally something living in the ductwork. Most of it is cheap and none of it is visible from the door.
We are not going to take advantage of a bad week
Somebody dealing with a house they have just inherited is, in commercial terms, an ideal customer: they do not know the equipment, they have no relationship with a contractor, they frequently want it dealt with quickly, and there is sometimes money in an estate. We know that, and we would rather say it out loud than pretend not to notice.
So the order is fixed. We find it and write it down. We do the safety checks. Then we tell you what is urgent, what can wait a season, and what does not need doing at all — and if the answer is that the system is fine and you should do nothing, that is what the document will say.