- Home
- Homes
Heating and cooling for houses in Erie County
Gas furnaces and boilers, central air, heat pumps, ductwork and extract — in a housing stock that is mostly older than the equipment in it.
No heat
Diagnosed from the cheap end. This is the order we actually work in, and it is deliberate.
| Checked | What it is and why it is at this point in the list |
|---|---|
| Power & controls | The breaker, the service switch beside the basement door that looks like a light switch, the door interlock, and the thermostat with its batteries. A real share of first-cold-night calls end here, and we say so. |
| Filter & airflow | A blocked filter trips the limit switch: the furnace lights, heats, shuts down and locks out. It reads exactly like a failure and it costs nothing to rule out. |
| Ignition & sensing | Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch, and the condensate trap on a high-efficiency furnace. Most genuine faults live here and most of them are inexpensive. |
| Circulators & zones | On a boiler, a zone cold while the others are warm is almost never the boiler. It is a circulator, a zone valve, a thermostat wire or an air lock. |
| Gas valve & board | Last, because they fail least and cost most. If we get there you see the reading that proves it before anything is ordered. |
| Heat exchanger | Inspected on every no-heat call whatever the fault was. A cracked one ends the visit — shut off and tagged, no repair attempted. |
Gas, or a carbon monoxide alarm
Do not ring a contractor first. Get everybody out of the house and, from outside, call 911 and your gas utility’s emergency line. They arrive faster than any contractor, they do not charge you for a false alarm, and making the property safe is their job.
Ring us afterwards. Finding out why it happened and putting it right is ours.
The room that never keeps up
The most common request we get, and the one most often answered with the wrong equipment.
It is nearly always one of four things: a branch added when a basement or an attic was finished and taken off a trunk with nothing spare; a flexible run crushed or kinked; a damper somebody closed years ago and nobody remembers; or a return duct far too small for the rooms it serves.
We measure static pressure across the system and the airflow at that register and at one that works. That turns an argument into two numbers on a page, and it usually identifies which of the four it is before anything is opened up.
An oversized furnace short-cycles, heats unevenly, and tends to make the cold room slightly worse rather than better.
Replacing something
A quote here is built from four things, and the rating on the old unit is not one of them.
Heat loss
Room by room, from the actual construction, glazing and insulation. Equipment fitted before about 2000 was routinely far too big, and matching it repeats the mistake with a better warranty.
The existing ducts
Measured. If the duct system cannot carry the air the new equipment needs, better equipment makes the house worse — and that goes in the quote either way rather than being discovered afterwards.
The venting
Going from an older furnace to a high-efficiency one changes it completely, and on a chimney shared with the water heater it changes that too. It belongs in the quote, not in a phone call on the day.
The electrical supply
Read off the plate of the proposed unit — minimum circuit ampacity and maximum breaker — and compared with the circuit that is actually there.
You get one page with model numbers, capacities, what is being removed, what is being altered, and the price.