Almost everything
breaks at the crossing.
Twice a year the weather asks a machine to start working after months of sitting still. The first hot week in June and the first cold week in October are when systems fail, and they are the two weeks when every company in the county is already booked. We schedule against those weeks rather than waiting for them.
What the year asks of the equipment
Four stretches, and the work is different in each one. Nothing here is a mystery to a technician. It is only a mystery to the person paying, which is the part worth fixing.
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Winter
Dec to Feb
26° to 32°F
The furnace runs almost continuously
A furnace in a Michigan January is not cycling gently. It runs, and the parts that fail are the ones being asked to work hardest: the igniter, the flame sensor, the inducer motor, and a filter that chokes the whole system if nobody has changed it since October.
Most common call No heat overnight, after a cold snap drops below 15°F.
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Spring
Mar to May
38° to 61°F
The window to test cooling, before anyone needs it
An air conditioner that has been off since September has lost refrigerant charge slowly, or it has not, and there is exactly one cheap way to find out. Running it in April tells you in twenty minutes. Finding out in the first 90° week means waiting four days on a list behind everyone else who also found out that morning.
What we do Charge check, coil clean, condensate line cleared before it can back up.
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Summer
Jun to Aug
70° to 75°F
Load, and everything that dislikes it
Capacitors fail in heat. So do contactors, and so does a condenser packed with cottonwood and grass clippings, which makes the whole system work harder to move the same air. Most of what gets called a broken air conditioner in August is one of those three, and two of them are cheap.
Most common call Running but not cooling, on the second or third day above 88°F.
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Fall
Sep to Nov
42° to 66°F
The heat exchanger inspection, while it is still optional
This is the visit that matters most and gets skipped most. A cracked heat exchanger puts combustion gas into the air you breathe, and it is found by looking, not by waiting for a symptom. October is also when a furnace that will not light is an inconvenience rather than a burst pipe.
What we do Heat exchanger inspection, combustion analysis, carbon monoxide test at the register.
Two visits, booked against the crossings
April and October, before the weather makes the appointment for you. It is the same work either way. The difference is whether it happens on a Tuesday you chose or a Saturday you did not.
If something we find during a plan visit needs repair, you get the price before we touch it, and the visit fee comes off the repair. We do not carry a diagnostic fee for plan customers, because charging twice to look at the same machine is how the trade earned its reputation.
The yearly plan
$228 a year
- Spring cooling visit, April
- Fall heating visit, October
- Heat exchanger and carbon monoxide test
- Filters supplied, four a year
- No diagnostic fee on any call
- Priority scheduling in the first hot and first cold week
Month to month after the first year. Cancel with a phone call.
No heat, right now, and it is January
Call. Do not fill in a form. A house below freezing is a plumbing emergency waiting to happen, and the useful thing we can do in the next ten minutes is talk you through the three things that are free to check before anybody drives out.
- 1 The thermostat batteries, which fail more often than furnaces do.
- 2 The furnace switch on the wall beside it, which looks like a light switch and gets turned off by accident.
- 3 The filter, if it has been in longer than three months.
If it is none of those, we come out. Nights and weekends included, at the same rate as a Tuesday morning.
From people on the plan
4.9 out of 5 stars, from 118 Google reviews 118 Google reviews
They found a cracked exchanger in October on a furnace I would have run all winter without thinking about it. Showed me the crack on a camera before saying a word about replacing anything.
Called at 9pm in February with no heat. Walked me through the switch on the wall, which was off. Did not charge me and did not make me feel stupid about it.
The April visit caught a capacitor that was reading low. Twelve dollars in spring instead of a no-cooling call in July.