Berkeley's housing stock is old, narrow and specific. This page is what we have learned working on it — the constraints, the reason a floor furnace has no successor, and the three routes a retrofit usually takes.
Berkeley filled in fast. The blocks south of campus went up around the turn of the century and through the 1910s — brown shingle, Craftsman bungalow, the occasional larger house cut into flats decades later. The 1923 fire took a wide band of the north side, and what replaced it went up through the mid-twenties, which is why the streets up there change character so abruptly from one block to the next. Then stucco in the thirties, a pause, and post-war infill wherever there was a gap.
The consequence for heating is simple. Almost none of it was built around a central heating system. Chimneys, yes. Gravity systems in the larger houses. Wall furnaces and floor furnaces added later, one appliance at a time, wherever a flue could be got to. Ductwork, where it exists at all, was usually added in the 1970s or later by somebody working in the space that was left over.
That is not a complaint about the houses. They are well built and they have lasted. It just means that the question "where does the equipment go" is a real question here, and it is the first one we answer.
Not because there is anything wrong with the idea, but because of what has happened to the market around it.
If your floor furnace works, you like it, and you are not trying to heat the rest of the house or to cool any of it, there is no urgency here. We are not going to tell you a working appliance is an emergency. The time to make this decision is when it fails, when you are opening the floor anyway, or when you have decided you want the whole house comfortable rather than one hallway.
These four decide the shape of the job. Everything after them is preference and budget.
Measured at the tightest point, not the hatch. Duct needs a body beside it to install it and to service it later. A generous crawlspace opens up a ducted system; a shallow one closes it off, and finding that out on day one saves a great deal of everyone's time.
It is harder, heavier and less forgiving than drywall, and it does not patch invisibly. We plan routes to cross it as few times as possible — through closets, through the crawlspace, up an exterior wall behind trim — rather than treating every wall as something you can simply cut into.
A heat pump is an electrical load, and a lot of these houses still have a small service with very little spare. We look at the panel on the survey and tell you what the equipment needs. If it needs an upgrade, that is your electrician's work and it belongs in your budget from the start.
An outdoor unit needs clear air, a condensate route and distance from windows. On a narrow lot with a house either side, siting it is a negotiation with the building, not a detail. We settle it on the survey and show you where it will stand.
The flats sit lower and take more of the marine air that comes through the Gate; the hills sit above it more often and get more sun on more afternoons. It is not a dramatic difference, but it is a real one, and it shows up in how much cooling anybody actually uses and in which rooms complain first.
Access differs more than climate does. A hillside house may have its only crawlspace access down a flight of exterior steps, a side yard three feet wide against a retaining wall, and no flat ground within thirty feet for an outdoor unit. That affects what the job costs and how long it takes, and we would rather say so on the survey than discover it with a van already parked.
We will tell you which ones your house supports and what separates them, and the quote will have all of them on it.
One outdoor unit, heads in the rooms that need them. No ceilings opened, no crawlspace work beyond the line route. Usually the fastest and the least disruptive, and the only option in houses with no space at all.
A small ducted system in a tall crawlspace, a basement or a converted attic. One thermostat, nothing on the walls. Needs the clearance, and usually needs the duct doing properly rather than reusing what is there.
Ducted where the house allows it — often the main floor — and a head or two in the rooms it cannot reach: the converted attic bedroom, the back addition, the office over the garage. More common here than either of the pure options.
It should not. The route is planned to cross finished walls as little as possible — up the outside of the building behind a line cover, through a closet, or through the crawlspace and up into a corner. Where we do have to open plaster, we tell you where and how large before the work starts, and the patching is in the quote.
Not for the heating equipment itself, which will be on a new dedicated circuit either way. It matters in two other places: it can constrain what an electrician is willing to do at the panel, and it affects what happens if you later insulate the areas the old wiring runs through. We flag it when we see it and leave the wiring to an electrician, which is where it belongs.
Often, yes — if the furnace is sound, correctly sized and has ductwork worth using. That is the cheapest route when it is available, and we will say so. It stops being the cheapest route when the duct needs replacing anyway, at which point you are paying for the expensive half of a heat pump installation without getting the heat pump.
Possibly, and this is an area where the rules in this part of California have changed more than once in recent years. We do not give you a version we half-remember. We check what applies to your address and your scope of work at the time we pull the permit, and we tell you what it means for your options before you choose one.
Yes, and the constraint is almost always about the exterior — what can be mounted on a visible elevation, and where. It is worth raising on the first call, because it can change where the outdoor unit and the line covers go, and that is much easier to design around at the start than to redo afterwards.
An hour, no obligation, and you get the options in writing afterwards whether or not you use us.