"Is it blowing air at all, or nothing?"
Air but not cold is a different fault from no air whatsoever. The first is usually the outdoor unit or the charge; the second is usually the blower, a switch or the power.
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When the person who pays is not the person who is cold.
Written for small landlords — one house, a duplex, a fourplex — by the contractor rather than by a property-management blog. Almost none of it is about the equipment.
The structural problem
Three people, one fault, and none of them has the whole picture.
The tenant knows what is happening and cannot authorise anything. You can authorise everything and are not in the building. We can fix it and have been told about it third-hand.
That is the entire difficulty, and every practice on this page exists to work around it. Nothing here is complicated. It is just not how a contractor who works mostly on owner-occupied houses is set up to operate, and the difference shows up as delay, repeat visits and an unhappy tenant rather than as a mechanical failure.
The single most useful thing we do about it: the findings go to you in writing the same day, with photographs — what we found, what we did, what we recommend and what it costs. You are then deciding from evidence rather than from a relayed phone call.
Before you call anybody
Five questions to ask your tenant.
Three minutes on the phone, and they change which van comes and how long the visit takes. A surprising number of call-outs are resolved by question two.
"Has the breaker tripped?"
Ask them to look, and ask them to look at the outdoor disconnect too. It resolves more calls than anything else on this list and it costs nobody anything.
"When did you last change the filter?"
If the answer is a blank pause, that is diagnostic in itself. A filter that has not been changed in two years will cause almost every symptom on this page.
"Is there water anywhere?"
Water at an indoor unit is usually a blocked drain and a tripped safety switch, which is a small job. Water on a ceiling is a different and more urgent conversation.
"What time of day is it worst, and which rooms?"
"All of it, all the time" is a system fault. "The back bedroom after three" is a duct or a solar-gain problem, and a different visit entirely.
Or let us ask them
With your permission we will call the tenant directly and run through these before we schedule anything. It takes us five minutes and it is free — it saves us a wasted visit, which is why we offer it.
The money question
Cheapest now, or cheapest over five years.
These are different answers more often on a rental than on an owner-occupied house, and the difference is not obvious from a single quote.
Cheapest now
What it actually buys
The lowest number on the invoice, and the building working again this week. On a sound system with one failed component, that is simply the right answer and we will say so.
Cheapest over five years
What it counts instead
The repair, plus the two repeats it implies, plus three call-out fees, plus three periods of a tenant being uncomfortable, plus the chance that one of them lands on a Saturday in August.
When we recommend it
A young system, one failed part
A capacitor, a contactor, a fan motor, a drain. Sound machine, ordinary wear, years of life left. Repair it and stop reading.
When we recommend replacing
An old system with a second failure
Especially where the first failure was within a year or two. The second failure on an ageing system is rarely the last, and each one costs you a visit and a phone call you did not want.
What we will not do
Pretend the repair is not viable
If it will hold, we say it will hold. Talking an absent owner into a replacement they do not need is easy and it is the fastest way to stop being trusted.
What we will not do either
Give you a savings figure
No percentages, no payback periods. What you get instead is both numbers and a sentence saying which we would choose if the building were ours, and why.
Access
Notice is yours. The arrival window is ours.
The division of responsibility here is simple and it is worth stating, because getting it wrong is the fastest way to turn a repair into a complaint.
Your part: the owner has to give the tenant proper notice before anybody enters. That is your obligation rather than ours, and the requirements are set by law and by your lease rather than by us. We will ask whether notice has been given and we will take your word for it — but we will ask.
Our part: we confirm an arrival window rather than a vague morning, we call ahead on the day, and we do not turn up unannounced at somebody's home even when we are holding a key. If we were told the tenant would be there and they are not, we leave and we tell you rather than letting ourselves in on an assumption.
That last one costs us an occasional wasted trip. It is still the right policy, because the alternative is being the contractor who walked into somebody's home unexpectedly — and that becomes your problem, not ours.
If you use a property manager
Tell us on the first call and give us the contact. We will deal with them on scheduling and access and copy you on the findings, or the other way round — whichever you prefer, agreed once rather than negotiated per visit.
The compounding one
Standardise across similar units.
The single most useful decision a small landlord can make about HVAC, it costs nothing extra, and almost nobody does it — because each unit gets replaced in a different year by whoever was available.
- One filter size
- Buy them by the boxFour different systems means four filter sizes, four trips and four chances of the wrong one being fitted. One size means you can hand a tenant a spare at move-in and keep a stack in the garage.
- One set of spares
- The common failures are commonCapacitors and contactors fail, and they fail in summer when everybody wants one. A single model across a building means the part on our van fits whichever unit called.
- One page of instructions
- The same sheet for every tenantHow to change the filter, what the thermostat does, what to check before ringing you. Written once, used for every unit and every turnover.
- One system to know
- The second call is faster than the firstA technician who serviced unit two last spring already knows where the drain runs, where the disconnect is and what the filter slot looks like in unit three.
- When not to
- Where the units genuinely differA converted upper floor with a different envelope, or a ground-floor unit with three exposed walls, may want different capacity. We will say so rather than force a match that costs somebody comfort for the sake of tidiness.
How to start, if the units are already mismatched
Do not replace working equipment to tidy the set. Decide now which model you would standardise on, write it down, and specify it the next time any unit needs replacing anyway. Within a few years the building converges on it at no extra cost. We will help you pick one and we will note it on your file so the decision is not made again by whoever answers the phone.
Two recurring arguments
Filters, and thermostats.
The filter problem
A tenant will not change a filter they do not know about, cannot reach, or cannot buy the right size for. Leases that say "tenant is responsible for filters" produce, in practice, filters that are never changed — and then a failure that costs you far more than the filters would have.
The arrangement that works: you supply them. Hand over a stack of the right size at move-in, put a note on the unit saying which size and where, and have the annual service change it as well. It costs a few pounds of filters a year and it removes the most common cause of a mid-summer call-out.
The thermostat argument
Locking covers exist and they do work. They also generate a specific kind of resentment, and a tenant who cannot set a comfortable temperature will call you about something eventually.
Where the concern is genuine — a shared system, a commercial-style setup, a unit left at 62 all August with the windows open — a limited range is usually a better answer than a lock: the tenant still controls it, within bounds you set. We will fit either, and we will tell you which of the two we think your situation actually calls for.
Turnover
The twenty minutes between tenants.
The only time the building is empty, accessible without notice, and nobody is inconvenienced. It is worth using.
- Change the filter and note the size on the unit, so the next tenant starts clean.
- Run both heating and cooling for ten minutes each. Finding a fault now is a scheduling problem; finding it in January is an emergency.
- Clear and test the condensate drain, which is the fault most likely to damage the building rather than merely annoy somebody.
- Check the outdoor coil and the clearances, which is where a previous tenant's storage habits show up.
- Leave the instruction sheet where the next tenant will find it, and the spare filters with it.
We will book a turnover visit around a vacancy at short notice, and it is a shorter and cheaper visit than a service call with somebody living there.
What we will not answer
Whether you are legally required to provide cooling. Whether a particular notice period is sufficient. What your lease means. Whether a habitability complaint has merit.
We are HVAC contractors, not lawyers, and those answers vary by city and change over time. What we will give you is a factual account of what your equipment is and what condition it is in — which is usually the thing your lawyer or your housing department actually needs — and we will not guess at the rest in order to win a job.
Rental questions
Asked once people have read this far.
My tenant says it is broken and I am two hours away. What now?
Give us the address and the tenant's number and tell us you are authorising a diagnostic. We will run the five questions with them, book a window directly with them once you confirm notice has been given, and send you the findings in writing the same day with photographs. You never have to drive out unless you want to.
Can I get a quote without the tenant being disturbed?
For anything outside — the condenser, the pad, the clearances — yes, and we can tell you a great deal from that alone. For a genuine diagnosis we have to get inside, because the indoor half of the system is where most faults actually are. We will schedule the inside visit for whenever suits the tenant rather than whenever suits us.
Is it worth putting air conditioning into a unit that has none?
It depends on the building and on what you are trying to achieve, and we will give you a straight answer rather than an enthusiastic one. What we will not do is tell you it will let you raise the rent by a given amount — that is not our field and anybody in our trade who offers you that number is guessing. We will tell you what it costs, what it involves and how long it takes.
The tenant says the system is running constantly. Is that expensive for them or for me?
Who pays the utility depends on your lease, and it changes the incentives rather than the fault. Either way a system running constantly and not reaching setpoint is telling you something — most often a filter, a leaking duct run, a low charge or a unit that was oversized and is now short-cycling in a way people misread as "always on". It is worth diagnosing rather than absorbing.
Do you work with property managers, or only owners direct?
Both, and it is worth settling which at the start. Tell us who schedules, who authorises spend and up to what figure, and who should receive the written findings. Agreed once, that arrangement removes most of the friction from every subsequent visit.
Tell us how many units and who is in them.
That is enough to set up the arrangement properly the first time rather than the third.