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Heating and cooling for Arvada houses
Gas furnaces, air conditioning, evaporative coolers, heat pumps and ductwork — with the same instruments we take onto a roof deck.
No heat, no cooling
Checked in the order that costs you least. This is the order we actually work in.
Power and controls
Breaker, the service switch beside the furnace that looks like a light switch, the door interlock, and the thermostat with its batteries and its schedule. A real share of calls end here and we say so.
Filter and 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 and sensing
Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch and the condensate trap on a high-efficiency furnace. Most genuine faults live here and most are inexpensive.
Capacitor and contactor
On an outdoor unit in summer, the two cheapest parts and the two that fail most. A unit that hums but will not start is usually one of them.
Valve, board, compressor
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 is ours.
What Arvada adds
Altitude
Arvada sits at roughly 5,300 ft and the input rating stamped on a gas appliance is a sea-level figure. Some manufacturers require an orifice kit above a stated elevation, some specify a manifold pressure change, some certify across a range with no change at all.
Which applies is in that model’s own installation instructions, so we read the model number off the plate and check rather than assume.
Evaporative cooling
Still the right machine in plenty of houses here, and on a lot of Arvada roofs. It brings outdoor air in, which is why it needs a window or a relief opening left open — and the commonest complaint about them, a house that goes muggy, is almost always because that relief path got closed up.
Where one genuinely cannot cope we will say so and price refrigerated cooling. We will not tell you it is obsolete, because here it is not.
The finished basement
Very common in this housing stock and a reliable source of complaints. A basement finished after the house was built usually got supply registers and no return, so it runs cold in winter, stuffy in summer, and pulls the rest of the house out of balance while it does it.
Adding a return is cheaper than any equipment and it fixes both seasons at once.
The room that never keeps up, and replacing things
Measured, not argued about
It is nearly always airflow: a branch added during a remodel, a crushed flexible run in a crawlspace or attic, a damper closed years ago, 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.
Occasionally bigger genuinely is right — a real addition, a converted garage, a finished basement that was never in the design. Then it is a heat loss calculation, not a guess.
What a replacement quote is built from
- Heat loss and heat gain, room by room, from the actual construction — not floor area and not the old unit’s rating.
- The existing ducts, measured. If they cannot carry what the new equipment needs, better equipment makes the house worse.
- The venting. Going to a high-efficiency appliance changes it completely, and on a flue shared with the water heater it changes that too.
- The electrical supply, read off the plate of the proposed unit and compared with the circuit that is there.
- One page with model numbers, capacities, what is removed, what is altered, and the price.