HVAC questions

Yes, with limits worth understanding. R-22 has not been produced since 2020, so every pound now comes from reclaimed stock and costs several times what R-410A does. We will recharge an R-22 system, but if it has a leak it will leak again, and on an older unit the arithmetic usually favours replacement within a season or two. We will tell you which situation you are in rather than sell you the same recharge every summer.

A repair is for a system that has stopped working properly, and it starts with a diagnostic visit. A tune-up is scheduled maintenance on a system that is still working, and it is flat-priced with no diagnostic fee. If your air conditioning has already failed, book the repair. Booking a tune-up on a failed system only delays the actual fix by a visit.

That is usually normal. A heat pump delivers air at around 90 to 100F, which is warmer than the room but cooler than your hand, so it feels cool if you are used to a gas furnace at around 130F. As long as the house is holding its temperature, nothing is wrong. If the house is not holding temperature, or the outdoor unit is encased in ice that never clears, that is a fault and worth a call.

No. We do not offer it and we rarely recommend it. For most homes there is no good evidence it improves air quality or system performance, and it is widely oversold. If you have a specific contamination problem, after a fire or a rodent infestation for example, that is a remediation specialist rather than us. What we do offer is duct sealing, which measurably reduces the conditioned air you lose into a loft.

No. Ductwork is HVAC but it is not emergency-eligible, and we will not dispatch a crew overnight for it. A duct problem makes a house uncomfortable; it does not leave you with no cooling in a heatwave or no heat in a freeze, which is what emergency cover exists for. If you have no heating or cooling at all, that is a repair and it is covered around the clock.

Eight to fifteen years for most equipment in this climate, and Triangle systems land at the lower end of national figures because they run most of the year. A well-maintained heat pump reaching twelve years has done well. What shortens it most is being oversized, which makes the system cycle on and off rather than run steadily, and skipping maintenance so the coils stay dirty.

Usually not, and frequently the correctly sized replacement is smaller. Oversizing is the most common fault we find in Triangle homes: the system cools the air quickly, satisfies the thermostat, and shuts off before it has removed the humidity, leaving a house that is cold and clammy. We run a Manual J load calculation on every replacement rather than matching what was there, and we will show you the numbers.

That is a humidity problem rather than a cooling problem, and it is the most common comfort complaint in the Triangle. Air conditioning removes moisture as a side effect of running, so on a mild humid day when the system barely runs, the moisture stays. A whole-home dehumidifier controls humidity independently of whether the AC is running, and it is the single most effective comfort improvement available on most Triangle homes.

Every one to three months for a standard one-inch filter, and every six to twelve months for a four or five inch media filter. In a house with pets or during heavy pollen weeks, closer to monthly. A blocked filter starves the system of airflow, which on a cooling system can freeze the coil and looks exactly like a refrigerant fault, so it is worth checking before you call anyone.

Late March through May for cooling, and September through October for heating. Two reasons: the dispatch board is not yet full of emergency no-cooling or no-heat calls, and a fault found in April is a scheduled repair rather than a miserable July evening. If you are on a maintenance plan we text you when a visit is due rather than leaving you to remember.

We shut the furnace down and red-tag it, because a cracked exchanger is a carbon monoxide risk and it cannot be safely repaired. That is not an upsell: a cracked exchanger on a furnace still under manufacturer warranty may be replaced free, and we will tell you if yours qualifies. If it does not, replacement is the only safe answer and we will quote it honestly, including the option of waiting until spring with temporary heat if the budget needs it.

A mini-split is the right answer for a garage conversion, a sunroom, an addition or a room the ducts never reached, and it is frequently cheaper than extending ductwork through a finished house. It is the wrong answer for replacing a working ducted system throughout a house purely to save money, because you end up with a head on the wall of every room. Extending the existing system only works if that system has spare capacity, which after a conversion it usually does not.

On a heat pump, that usually means the heat pump itself has failed quietly and the electric auxiliary heat strips have been carrying the house. They work, and they are expensive to run, so the house feels fine while the bill climbs. It is worth booking a heat pump service if your bill has risen without weather to explain it, because the fault has probably been there for weeks.