Residential HVAC, done properly
We fix what's broken, replace what's finished, and install what your home needs. Alongside that we keep systems maintained under a service agreement and handle the indoor air quality side: filtration, humidity and carbon monoxide detection. Keeping the list this focused is deliberate. A company that sells everything is rarely good at all of it, and the work we turn down is the work we would be learning on.
What that means on a service call is that the person who arrives has spent years on this specific equipment in this specific housing stock. Montgomery and Prince George's County are not generic territory: a 1950s Silver Spring rambler with a retrofitted duct system, a Takoma Park foursquare on a steam boiler, a Bethesda rebuild with three zones and a condo fan coil off Wisconsin Ave all fail in different ways, and knowing which failure you are looking at before you open the panel is most of the job.
How a visit actually goes
You describe what the house is doing. We ask a few questions on the phone, because some of them can be answered there and save you a call-out. On site, the technician measures before recommending anything: static pressure, temperature split, refrigerant charge by superheat and subcool, combustion figures on anything that burns gas. Then you get told what is wrong, what it takes to fix, and what it costs, before anybody picks up a tool.
If the honest answer is that a repair will hold for another few seasons, that is the answer you get. Plenty of systems get condemned years early because a replacement is a bigger ticket than a capacitor. If the honest answer is that the equipment is finished, we will show you the reasoning: the age, the refrigerant, the failure mode, the cost of the repair against the cost of the replacement, and what the operating cost difference actually looks like on a Pepco or Washington Gas bill.
Repair or replace
The question nearly every homeowner asks. There is no single rule, but the factors are knowable: how old the system is against its expected life, whether the failed part is a wear item or a compressor or heat exchanger, what refrigerant it uses and whether that refrigerant is still being made, how much of the repair cost you would be spending twice, and whether the existing installation was sized correctly in the first place. We wrote this up at length on repair or replace, and it is worth reading before you are standing in a hot house making the decision under pressure.
Nothing starts before you have a written price
You get the price in writing before any work begins, on every job, and it does not move afterwards unless we find something we could not have seen and you agree to it first. No line items appearing later on the invoice, and no pressure attached to the options we put in front of you.
What we will not do is publish numbers on a web page and call them a quote. The same nominal system lands very differently depending on things nobody can see from here — the tonnage a real load calculation produces, whether the duct system can carry that airflow, whether the existing line set can be reused, whether the panel has capacity, and permit requirements, which differ between Montgomery County and Prince George’s County. A number quoted without knowing those is a guess, and guesses have a way of becoming change orders.
There are usually ways to bring a project within reach that have nothing to do with cheaper equipment: Pepco and BGE rebate programs, financing, and whatever is running on our current offers. We will walk through which of those you qualify for when we are standing in the house.
When it cannot wait
No heat in January and no cooling in July are not scheduling problems. Emergency service runs 24 hours, including holidays and weekends. If you smell gas, leave the house first and call the gas utility from outside, then call us.
Where we work
Fifteen communities across both counties, worked out of the shop in Silver Spring, with the same crew and the same hours everywhere on the list. Each one has its own page covering the housing stock, what the weather does to equipment there, and the problems we run into most often — start at service areas, or go straight to Montgomery County or Prince George's County.