Services

01 · The most common job here

Wall & floor furnace replacement

A wall furnace is a gas heater set into a wall cavity, open to the room, usually heating one or two rooms and nothing else. A floor furnace sits in the crawlspace and pushes heat up through a large iron grate in the floor. Both were fitted in enormous numbers across Berkeley, Albany and north Oakland, and a lot of them are still running.

They are simple, they are long-lived, and they have three problems. They heat one part of the house and leave the rest cold. They cannot cool. And when one finally fails, the modern market does not offer a straight swap — the products that replaced them are a different shape and, in a growing number of cases, a different fuel.

So this is not really a replacement job. It is a decision about how the house 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
Crawlspace 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

The point people are surprised by

Patching the wall or the floor is part of the job and is quoted with it. A wall furnace leaves a cavity the width of a stud bay; a floor furnace leaves an opening the size of a small rug, with framing cut around it. Finding out afterwards that nobody was going to close it is a bad afternoon.

An old gas wall furnace being removed from a stud bay in a plaster wall, dust sheets on the floor around it. — The cavity a wall furnace leaves behind

02 · For houses with nowhere to put duct

Ductless heat pumps

A heat pump outdoor unit mounted on brackets in a narrow side yard between a wood-frame house and a fence. — Siting the outdoor unit is half of a ductless job

Where the outdoor unit goes

Side yard, rear yard, or on brackets off a wall. It needs clear air on the intake and discharge sides, a route for condensate, and enough distance from bedroom windows — yours and next door's — that nobody resents it. On a 30-foot Berkeley lot this is a real constraint and we settle it on the survey, not on install day.

One outdoor unit. One small indoor head in each room that needs heating and cooling. Between them, a pair of insulated refrigerant lines about the diameter of a pencil, a control cable and a condensate drain — a bundle that fits through a three-inch hole.

That is the whole reason it suits these houses. No attic required, no crawlspace clearance required, no ceilings opened, no soffits built. Each room gets its own setpoint, which matters in a house where the south-facing front room and the north-facing back bedroom have never been the same temperature.

What it is good at

Heating and cooling a house that has never had either properly
Room-by-room control, including rooms nobody uses
Working around plaster instead of through it
Adding to a house in stages, a floor at a time

What it is not

It is not invisible. There is a unit on the wall of each room, a line-set run on the outside of the building or boxed in behind trim, and a machine in the side yard. We will show you exactly where each of those lands before you agree to anything, because the answer to "will it look all right" is a matter of routing and it is decided on the survey.

03 · When the house has the room

Ducted systems & ductwork

Some of these houses do have somewhere to put duct: a full-height basement, a tall crawlspace, a converted attic with a chase, or an existing gravity or forced-air system already in place. Where that is true, a ducted heat pump or furnace gives you one thermostat, no equipment in the rooms and no line-sets on the outside walls.

The catch is almost never the equipment. It is the duct. Ductwork put into a Berkeley crawlspace in 1978 is usually undersized for what people now expect, frequently uninsulated, and leaking at every joint that was taped rather than sealed. Hanging a new machine on that is buying a good system and running it through a bad one.

So we quote the duct separately

Every ducted quote we write has the equipment on one line and the duct work on another, with what each buys you. If the duct is sound, you will see a small number there and you should be pleased. If it is not, you will see a large one — and you can decide, with the figures in front of you, whether to do it now or to do a ductless system instead for similar money.

Ducted heat pumps and furnaces
New duct in crawlspaces and basements
Sealing and insulating existing runs
Adding returns where there is only one
Registers and grilles that suit the room
Removing abandoned gravity duct

Return air: One return is not enoughMost old retrofits have a single return in a hallway. Close the bedroom doors and the system is fighting the house. Adding returns, or undercutting doors and fitting transfer grilles, is cheap and it is the change people notice most.
Sizing: Bigger is not betterAn oversized system reaches the thermostat quickly, shuts off, and leaves the far rooms behind. We size to the house as it is, including the insulation it does and does not have.
Insulation: Uninsulated duct in a vented crawlspacegives back a good part of what you paid to heat. Where we find it, it is in the quote — and where it is already insulated and intact, you will not be sold new duct you do not need.
Noise: Undersized duct is loudA rushing sound at the registers is nearly always velocity, not the machine. It is a design problem and it gets designed out, not turned down.

04 · Diagnose first

Repair & diagnostics

Heating that will not start. Cooling that runs all afternoon and changes nothing. A system that starts, stops, starts again. A noise that is new. A thermostat that has stopped agreeing with the room.

We charge a diagnostic fee to come out and find the cause, and we credit it against the repair if you go ahead with us. That way the incentive is to find the fault, not to find a reason to replace the machine.

When a repair is not worth doing, you will be told that plainly, with the reason — a failed compressor on a system past its service life, a cracked heat exchanger, a part no longer made. We would rather lose a repair than sell one that buys you four months.

Honest limit

We are a small shop and we do not advertise 24-hour emergency cover, because two people cannot staff it properly and a promise that fails at two in the morning is worse than no promise. Calls left overnight are answered first thing, and genuine no-heat situations go to the front of the day.

Gloved hands holding refrigerant manifold gauges connected to the service ports of an outdoor heat pump unit. — Readings before opinions

05 · Once a year

Maintenance

An annual visit, booked for a date that suits you. Filters changed, coils cleaned, the condensate drain cleared and tested, refrigerant charge checked against the manufacturer's figures, electrical connections torqued, and the drain pan looked at properly rather than glanced at.

While we are under the house we look at the duct. A disconnected run, a crushed flexible section or a rodent hole is far easier to find on a maintenance visit than in January when the back bedroom has stopped getting warm.

You get it written up afterwards, with photographs of anything we want you to see. If there is nothing to report, the report says so.

What maintenance does not do

It does not make an undersized system adequate, it does not fix a duct layout that was wrong when it was installed, and it does not extend the life of a compressor that is on its way out. It keeps a sound system sound and it finds problems while they are still small. Anyone selling it as more than that is selling something else.