An instrument goes on the system before anybody recommends anything — and you get the readings, whether you buy something or not.
Manometer, not guesswork
Most disputes between a homeowner and an HVAC contractor come down to the fact that nobody wrote anything down. These four numbers take twenty minutes and settle most of it.
How hard the blower is working to push air through the ducts and the filter. The single most useful number on a residential system, and the one almost nobody takes. Too high and the equipment cannot perform, regardless of its age or its rating.
The temperature difference the system is actually achieving across the coil. It tells you immediately whether the problem is capacity, airflow or charge, and it costs nothing but two probes and a minute.
Calculated from refrigerant pressures and line temperatures. This is how you know whether a system is correctly charged, as opposed to adding refrigerant because the gauge looked low and hoping.
Compressor and blower current compared with what the data plate says they should pull. A motor drawing well over its rating is telling you it is in trouble long before it stops.
A recommendation with a measurement behind it can be checked by anybody — including the next contractor. That is the point. If we say a condenser needs replacing, the numbers should make that obvious to a second opinion, and if they do not, we should not be saying it.
Residential is the larger part of the week. Light commercial is the rest, and it has its own page.
Not cooling, short cycling, icing, tripping a breaker, or running from noon to midnight. Diagnosed on instruments, priced before the repair.
Load calculated from the building. Ducting assessed before equipment is specified. Permit, Title 24 and inspection handled.
Conversions and new installs. On the Peninsula the climate suits them, the code increasingly favours them, and one machine covers both seasons.
Static pressure, leakage, return sizing and register balancing. Where most comfort complaints actually originate, and the cheapest thing to fix.
Furnace service, heat-exchanger and combustion checks, replacement, thermostats and zoning.
Office and R&D suites, small retail, tenant improvement fit-outs, equipment rooms. Same method, larger equipment, longer paperwork.
At the end of every diagnostic visit you get a single sheet: what was measured, what the value was, what it should have been, and what we concluded from the gap.
It is not a sales document. If the readings say the system is fine and the problem is a blocked return grille, that is what the sheet says, and the visit ends with a fifteen-dollar fix instead of a quote.
It also travels. Take it to another contractor, keep it for the next owner, or hand it to a landlord. Once numbers exist, the conversation stops being about who sounds more confident.
A window you can plan around, and a message before we set off. We do not use "sometime Tuesday".
Roughly an hour. Static pressure, temperatures, pressures, amps, and a look at the ducting and the return.
What the numbers say, what follows from them, and where there is a genuine choice, both options priced.
Readings, photographs and conclusion. Yours to keep regardless of what you decide to do next.
We are on East Middlefield Road, in the middle of Mountain View's R&D and light-industrial corridor, which is how the commercial side of the business started.
Tenant improvement work, rooftop units on tilt-up buildings, equipment and server rooms that have to hold temperature whatever the office is doing, and ventilation that has to satisfy an inspector rather than just a tenant.
Mountain View, Sunnyvale, Palo Alto and Santa Clara are all inside twenty minutes of the shop. We keep the radius tight on purpose — an arrival window is only worth giving if it can be kept.
It means an instrument goes on the system before a recommendation comes out of anyone's mouth. Total external static pressure, supply and return temperatures, refrigerant pressures, superheat and subcooling, compressor and blower amp draws. Those numbers either support replacing a part or they do not, and you get a copy of them either way.
Because it is the single most useful number on a residential system and it is almost never taken. It tells you whether the blower can actually move the air the equipment was designed around. A system with high static pressure will underperform no matter how new the condenser outside is, and replacing that condenser will not fix it.
Yes. Houses are the larger part of the week, and light-commercial work — office and R&D suites, small retail, tenant improvement fit-outs, equipment and server rooms — is the rest. The methodology is identical; the equipment is larger and the paperwork is longer.
Yes, a flat fee, told to you on the phone before we come out, and credited against the repair if you go ahead with it. A diagnosis done properly takes about an hour of instrument work. Anybody offering it free is recovering the cost somewhere else in the invoice.
Yes. Equipment changeouts in California generally require a permit and Title 24 documentation, and the Peninsula jurisdictions inspect. We pull the permit, prepare the paperwork, schedule the inspection and hand over the closed permit with the job file.
One visit, one sheet of readings, and a decision you can actually check.