- Home
- Services
Services
Five things, written out in full — including what each one does not cover and, where it differs, how the job changes when somebody else lives in the building.
Repair
Diagnose first, quote second, and put the findings in front of whoever is actually paying.
A flat diagnostic fee brings a technician out to find the cause and take readings, credited against the repair 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.
When a repair is not worth doing you will hear that plainly, with the reason — a failed compressor on a system past its service life, a leaking evaporator coil that costs most of a replacement, a part no longer made. You get both numbers and the decision stays yours.
Common faults in this housing stock
- A filter nobody has changed in years, which looks exactly like a failing system
- Capacitors, contactors and fan motors that gave out during a heat run
- A blocked condensate drain and the safety switch that shuts the system down
- A disconnected flexible duct run in an attic nobody has been into since the last tenant
- Refrigerant low because it is leaking, which means finding the leak
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 an annual top-up as a service — on a let property that is a cost you carry every summer for a fault nobody fixed.
If you are not the one in the building
The findings go to you in writing the same day: what we found, what we did, what we recommend and what it costs — with photographs of anything that needs them.
That matters more than it sounds. A written record per unit means the next fault on the same system starts from what the last visit found rather than from scratch, and it means you are not deciding based on a relayed phone call.
Replacement
Air conditioners, furnaces and heat pumps, sized to the building rather than matched to whatever came out of it.
Matching the outgoing unit repeats whatever mistake was made the first time, and in this housing stock the common mistake is oversizing. An oversized system reaches the thermostat quickly, shuts off, and leaves the far rooms behind — which produces exactly the complaint people then try to fix by going bigger again.
So we calculate from the building: square footage, orientation, glazing, insulation and how the attic behaves. On an older Pomona house that number is frequently lower than the equipment currently installed.
- Heat pumps
- A genuinely good fit hereWinters are mild, which is the condition heat pumps handle best, and one machine covers both seasons. We raise it on most replacement quotes. We will not attach a savings figure to it.
- Ductwork
- On its own line, alwaysIf yours is sound you will see a small number there and you should be pleased. Hanging new equipment on leaking attic duct is buying a good machine and running it through a bad system.
- Permit
- Pulled by us, inspector met by usChangeouts are permitted work. An unpermitted install surfaces years later, usually in escrow — and on a rental, sometimes sooner than that.
- Disposal
- Old equipment taken awayAnd refrigerant recovered properly rather than vented.
If you own several similar units
Say so before you choose equipment. Specifying the same model across a fourplex costs nothing extra at the point of replacement and pays back every year afterwards: one filter size to buy in bulk, one set of common spares on the van, one page of instructions that works for every tenant, and a technician who already knows the system on the second call.
Where the units genuinely differ — a converted upstairs with a different envelope, a ground-floor unit with three exposed walls — we will say so rather than force a match that costs you comfort.
Wall & floor heaters
Still in service in a great many older Pomona houses and small buildings, and there is no like-for-like modern replacement.
A wall heater is a gas appliance set into a wall cavity, open to the room, heating one or two rooms and nothing else. A floor heater sits below the floor and pushes heat up through a grate. Both are simple, both last a long time, and both have the same three problems: they heat one part of the building, they cannot cool, and when one finally fails the market does not offer a straight swap.
So this is not really a replacement job. It is a decision about how the building should be heated from here, made once, while the wall or the floor is already open.
What the visit covers
- What the existing unit heats, and what it never has
- The state of the vent or flue, and whether it can be reused
- Attic clearance, if a ducted option is on the table
- Electrical capacity, if a heat pump is on the table
- What the hole in the wall or floor becomes afterwards — priced with the job, not after it
The one thing we say plainly
If the heater works, it is safe, and nobody is trying to heat the rest of the building or cool any of it, there is no urgency. We are not going to tell you a working appliance is an emergency. The moment to decide is when it fails, when the wall is open anyway, or when the building's heating has to be looked at properly.
And the one thing we insist on
A gas appliance in a room somebody sleeps in gets looked at properly — venting, combustion and clearances — whether or not that was what we were called for. If we find something we are not comfortable with, we will say so and we will not simply leave it running because it was not in the scope.
Rentals & multi-unit
Duplexes, fourplexes, converted houses and small apartment buildings — where the operational questions matter as much as the mechanical ones.
It is the half of this business that has a page of its own, because almost none of what makes it difficult is about the equipment. It is about who reports the fault, who gives notice, who is there to let us in, what lasts five years rather than five months, and whether four units can share one set of spares.
What we offer that a general residential contractor usually does not: scheduled service across several units in one visit, one written record per unit so the next visit starts from what the last one found, standardised equipment where the units are similar, and findings sent to the owner in writing the same day rather than relayed through a tenant.
- Several units serviced in one visit where the schedule allows
- One written record per unit, kept and carried forward
- Equipment standardised across similar units, at no extra cost
- An arrival window rather than a vague morning, every time
- Insurance certificates and licence sent up front
- A turnover check between tenants, booked around the vacancy
Ductwork & maintenance
The unglamorous half, and on a let property the cheapest insurance against a July phone call.
Ductwork. In this housing stock the duct lives in an attic that spends summer afternoons far hotter than the rooms below it. Every leaking joint is conditioned air paid for and thrown away; every sagging run is airflow the last bedroom never receives. We seal with mastic rather than tape that lets go in attic heat, support what sags, insulate what is bare, and add return air where one hallway grille is doing the work for three closed doors.
Maintenance. Once a year before the season: coils, condensate drain cleared and tested, refrigerant charge against the manufacturer's figures, electrical connections, blower and filter, plus a look at the duct while we are up there.
On a let property that visit does one more thing. It changes the filter that the tenant was never going to change, which is the single most common cause of a mid-summer failure and the one that generates the angriest phone call.
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.
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 buildings 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.
Not sure which of those you need?
Tell us what the building is, who lives in it, and what is going wrong. That settles most of it on the phone.