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Five things, written out in full — including what each one does not cover and when we would tell you not to buy it.
Replacement in attached homes
Townhomes, condominiums and stacked flats. The equipment part is ordinary; everything around it is not.
We size to the unit rather than to a rule of thumb — an interior flat with one exposed wall and neighbours above, below and either side has a very different load from an end unit with three exposed elevations, and the same floor plan can want quite different equipment depending on where it sits in the building.
Then the parts that a detached house never raises: where the outdoor unit may legally go, how it is isolated from the structure, how the line route crosses whatever it has to cross, how the equipment gets into the building at all, and what the association requires before any of it starts.
The quote separates
- Equipment
- Isolation and vibration work
- Line route, penetrations and making good
- Access: lift booking, corridor protection, loading
- Permit, inspection and disposal
And the submittal, at no charge
The association package goes out with the quote. It is free, it is yours whether or not you use us, and it exists because a rejected submittal costs everybody two months.
Service clearance
The one thing we check in a closet before anything else: can the next person actually reach it? A great many units in this valley have equipment installed so tightly that a filter change means removing a door.
Where we can improve that within the same footprint, we do, and we say so on the quote. Where we cannot, we tell you what you are accepting.
Ductless & closet air handlers
Two configurations cover almost everything in attached housing here, and each has a constraint that decides the job.
- Closet air handler
- A small ducted system inside the unitOne thermostat, nothing on the walls, duct in a dropped ceiling or a soffit. Wants service clearance, a condensate route and a return path the original builder often did not provide.
- Ductless
- Heads on the wall, lines to an outdoor unitThe answer where there is no closet, no chase and no ceiling space. Room-by-room control, which matters in a unit where one bedroom faces a courtyard and another faces a car park.
- The route
- Where lines cross rated assembliesIn attached housing a wall or floor between units is usually a fire-rated assembly. Anything passing through it has to be sealed to maintain that rating. It is routine work and it is not optional, and it is one reason a route is designed rather than found.
- Condensate
- Somewhere legal, not just somewhere downhillDraining onto a balcony, a walkway or the unit below is the most common quiet violation we find. Where gravity does not give a proper route, a pump does.
- Appearance
- Because the association will lookLine covers matched and run straight, screens where required, penetrations sealed and finished. On a detached house this is tidiness. Here it is an approval condition.
Noise & vibration
Being called by the neighbour, or by the board. It is a real speciality and it is mostly not about the machine.
Sound in a shared building travels two ways. Airborne noise goes through the air and is stopped reasonably well by a party wall. Structure-borne noise goes through the building itself, and a party wall does very little about it.
Almost every complaint we attend is the second kind: equipment bolted hard to framing, duct touching a stud, a line set strapped rigidly to a joist, a pump fixed directly to a wall the neighbour's bed is against. Replace the machine and the path is still there.
What we actually do
- Isolation pads or spring mounts under the outdoor unit
- Flexible connectors where duct meets the air handler
- Re-hanging duct so it is not in contact with framing
- Resilient clips and sleeves on line sets, especially at penetrations
- Moving a condensate pump off a shared wall
- Reducing airflow velocity where the noise is the duct rather than the machine
What we will not give you
A decibel figure, before or after. The number that matters is in your neighbour's bedroom, not at the machine, and it depends on the structure between them. We will tell you what we are going to change and why, and then you and the neighbour can tell us whether it worked — which is the only measurement that counts here.
HOA approval submittals
Prepared with every quote, at no extra cost, and yours to use with another contractor if you would rather.
It is the most useful thing we do and it has a page of its own, because the procedural failures in this work cost more than the technical ones.
Repair & maintenance
Diagnostic first, quote second, and a filter that somebody can actually reach.
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 gets paid for somewhere, and it usually gets paid for by finding a reason to sell a system.
Annual service covers coils, the condensate route and pump, refrigerant charge against the manufacturer's figures, electrical connections, filters, and — because we are here — a look at whether anything has come into rigid contact with the structure since last year. Things move.
For managers and boards
Where an association or a manager looks after several units in one building, we will schedule them together. It is cheaper for everybody, it means one set of corridor protection and one lift booking, and it gives you a single written record per building rather than a file of unrelated invoices.
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.
What maintenance will not do
It will not make an undersized system adequate, it will not fix a duct layout that was wrong when the building went up, 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 small. In attached housing it does one more thing: it catches a developing noise path before it becomes a complaint from the unit next door, which is a cheaper problem than the one that arrives by letter.
Not sure which of those you need?
Tell us the building type, the floor, and whether an association is involved. That settles most of it on the phone.