Out here the summer runs past 100°F and the sky goes orange most Septembers. We handle both ends of that — the cooling and the air you are actually breathing.
Equipment here does not fail randomly. It fails in a pattern, because of where it is.
Long runs above 95°F are ordinary in July and August, and the valley sits twenty to thirty degrees above San Francisco on the same afternoon. A system specified for a coastal load simply runs out of capacity here, and then runs all day trying.
Late summer and autumn now come with days you keep the windows shut. What your system does with the air in those weeks depends almost entirely on the filter and the cabinet it sits in.
Most ducting around here runs through an attic that gets brutally hot. Every leak in it is conditioned air paid for and thrown away, and every degree picked up on the way is a degree the equipment has to make twice.
Repair, replace, improve the ducting, improve the air. The habit is measuring before recommending.
Not cooling, short cycling, tripping the breaker, or running from noon to midnight. Diagnosed on readings before a single part is quoted.
Sized from the house and this climate, not from the sticker on the old unit. Permit, Title 24 paperwork and inspection included.
Furnace service, heat-exchanger inspection, and heat pumps — which now cover a Contra Costa winter comfortably and handle the summer as well.
Leak testing, sealing, replacement and returns that are big enough. The most common fix for "one room is always hot", and the cheapest.
Deeper filter cabinets, MERV 13 media, ventilation and humidity. The part of this trade that matters most in September.
One visit in spring is the cheapest hour you will spend on a system that is about to work hard for five straight months.
Wildfire smoke is mostly fine particulate — the fraction small enough to travel deep into the lungs, and small enough that an ordinary one-inch filter is not rated to catch it at all.
Upgrading is not simply a matter of buying a denser filter and pushing it into the same slot. A restrictive filter in a system designed around a thin one starves the blower, drops capacity and can freeze the coil. The fix is nearly always more filter area rather than more resistance.
Filters are graded by ASHRAE Standard 52.2, which measures how much of each particle size range they remove. These are the published minimums for MERV 13 — not our claims, the standard's.
The bottom bar is the one that matters for smoke, because fine particulate lives in that range. Filters below MERV 13 are not rated in it at all.
Dust, pollen, larger debris.
Mould spores, fine dust, some bacteria.
Smoke particulate. Nothing below MERV 13 is rated here.
Source: ASHRAE Standard 52.2 minimum composite efficiencies for MERV 13.
An arrival window you can plan around, and a message before we set off.
Readings at the equipment, at the return and at the registers. Then we tell you what they mean.
Repair and, where it is relevant, replacement, side by side. No same-day-only pricing.
Old parts shown to you, packaging taken away, system left running while we are still there.
There is no sales department here, because there are not enough of us to have one. Nobody earns commission on equipment either, which is the only arrangement under which "this has a few years left, let's repair it" can be an honest answer.
We stay in central Contra Costa on purpose. A short radius is what lets us give arrival windows we keep and come back the same week if something is not right.
We are on Tice Valley Boulevard, which puts Walnut Creek, Alamo, Lafayette and Danville inside fifteen minutes and the rest of the list inside thirty. Past that we would rather tell you honestly who is closer.
Sometimes, and sometimes it makes things worse. A thicker, denser filter restricts airflow, and a system that was designed around a one-inch filter can end up starved — which drops capacity, freezes coils and shortens the blower's life. The right move is usually a deeper filter cabinet that holds a MERV 13 media filter with far more surface area, so you get the filtration without the pressure drop.
Nine times out of ten it is the ductwork rather than the equipment — a crushed or disconnected run, a return that is far too small, or a system that has to push air uphill to a west-facing bedroom that takes the afternoon sun. We measure airflow at the register before recommending anything, because replacing equipment does not fix a duct problem.
Enough that it changes the equipment specification. The Diablo Valley regularly runs 20 to 30 degrees hotter than San Francisco on the same afternoon, and long stretches above 95°F are normal in July and August. Systems sized for a mild coastal load are simply not enough here.
Estimates for new systems, replacements, ductwork and filtration projects are free. A diagnostic visit on an existing system carries a flat service-call fee, which we tell you about on the phone and credit against the repair if you go ahead.
Yes. A changeout in California generally needs a permit and Title 24 documentation, and Contra Costa jurisdictions do inspect. We pull the permit, prepare the paperwork, schedule the inspection and hand over the closed permit with the job.
Spring is the cheapest time to find out your system will not make it through August.