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Old timber houses, a hundred years of alterations, and one furnace expected to cope
Vallejo housing stock has been extended, subdivided, re-glazed and re-insulated in every decade since it was built. The heating rarely got redesigned at the same time, and that is where most of the complaints come from.
The six calls we take most
Nothing is working
No heat on a cold morning, no cooling in a heat spell, a furnace that lights and shuts down again, a breaker that keeps going. Diagnosed and priced before anything is fitted. If a repair is not worth the money on that machine, we say so in those words.
One room never warms up
Measured, not guessed. Airflow at that register against the others, static pressure across the system, the state of the duct run feeding it and whether the room has a path back to the return. The commonest answer in this housing stock is a duct problem under the floor.
The house is draughty
A draught you can feel needs a source and a sink — air is leaving somewhere as well as entering. We look at both, and we will tell you honestly when the answer is weatherstripping and a building contractor rather than anything to do with us.
The bills have climbed
Before you replace anything: charge, airflow, duct leakage, filter restriction and combustion efficiency measured. A system losing a third of its air into a crawl space costs a great deal more to run than one that is not, and it is far cheaper to fix.
Annual service
Burners, heat exchanger, flue, coils, drains, filter fit, electrical connections, refrigerant charge and combustion testing, with the readings recorded so this year can be compared with last year rather than remembered.
Rentals and flats
Owners and managers who are not local, and duplexes where two units share a wall and an argument. We attend, report with photographs and a price, and authorise nothing you have not seen in writing.
The crawl space is where the money goes
Most heating ducts in this town run through a crawl space that is, effectively, outside. Sixty or eighty years of settlement, rodents, plumbers, cable installers and previous alterations have had a go at them.
What we find, in rough order of frequency: a supply boot pulled off its register and heating the underside of the floor; flexible duct crushed flat where somebody crawled over it; joints that were taped with cloth duct tape decades ago and have let go; insulation hanging off; and a return path that was never sized for the rooms that were added.
None of that is exotic and none of it is expensive to put right compared with equipment. It is simply not visible from inside the house, which is why it is so often skipped straight past on the way to a replacement quote.
Four things we say to homeowners here
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A bigger furnace will not warm a cold room
If the air is not arriving, more heat at the source makes the rest of the house warmer and that room no better. Measure the register before anybody sizes anything.
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Sealing the ducts often beats replacing the furnace
It costs a fraction, it is usually a day, and on a leaky system it changes the bills more than a higher efficiency rating would. We will not put a percentage on it for your house, because that depends on your ducts.
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Age alone is not a reason to replace
An old furnace that burns cleanly, passes its heat exchanger inspection and moves the air it should is a furnace that works. Age changes the arithmetic on an expensive repair. It does not by itself justify a new machine.
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A gas appliance with no carbon monoxide alarm is the one urgent item
Everything else on this page can wait for a convenient week. That cannot. Fit one, and have the furnace combustion tested and the heat exchanger inspected.