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Heating and cooling for houses in Johns Creek
Gas furnaces, heat pumps, air conditioning and ductwork. The same analyser and the same manometer we take onto a roof deck — a smaller building, not a lesser job.
The long season
Georgia runs cooling for most of the year, so most of what fails here fails in summer and most of it fails for the same handful of reasons.
Capacitor and contactor
The two cheapest parts on an outdoor unit and the two that fail most. A unit that hums but will not start is usually one of them, and it is a short visit.
A blocked coil
Pollen, grass and dust load a condenser coil fast here. It does not stop the unit, it just quietly halves what it can do and raises the bill for every hour it runs.
Low charge
Measured, not topped up on sight. Refrigerant is not consumed — a system that wants more every year is leaking, and the leak is the job.
A frozen coil
Low airflow or low charge. Switch cooling off, leave the fan running, and call. Running a compressor with a frozen coil is how compressors fail.
Condensate
A blocked drain trips the safety switch and the system stops with nothing apparently wrong. In an attic air handler the alternative is a ceiling stain, which is why the switch is there.
The thermostat
Batteries, wiring and settings. A share of summer call-outs genuinely end here and we say so rather than finding something else to charge for.
Where most of the comfort goes
In this part of Georgia the air handler is very often in the attic, with the ducts around it. An attic reaches temperatures in August that make a duct leak far more expensive than the same leak in a basement, because the air that does arrive has been sitting in the heat on the way.
The room that never keeps up
The most common request we get, and the one most often answered with the wrong equipment. It is nearly always one of five things:
- A branch added during a remodel, taken off a trunk with nothing spare.
- A flexible run crushed, kinked or run twice as long as it needed to be.
- A damper somebody closed years ago and nobody remembers.
- A return duct far too small for the rooms it serves — air that cannot get back cannot keep arriving.
- Duct leakage into the attic, losing the air before it gets there at all.
We measure static pressure and the airflow at that register, which turns an argument into two numbers. An oversized replacement makes it slightly worse, and that is what usually gets sold.
Gas furnaces and heat pumps
Georgia winters are short but they are not nothing, and a system that runs eight months on cooling still has to work in January. Furnaces are combustion tested with an analyser and the readings written down; heat pumps get the charge, the defrost cycle and the auxiliary heat checked rather than assumed.
Auxiliary electric heat is worth a conversation. A heat pump with a fault that runs on auxiliary heat all winter will keep the house warm and produce an electricity bill nobody can explain, and the only way to spot it is to look.
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 and putting it right is ours.
What a replacement quote is built from
A room-by-room heat loss and heat gain calculation, the measured capacity of the existing ducts, the venting, and the electrical supply read off the plate of the proposed unit — not the rating on the old one. Equipment fitted before about 2000 was routinely far too big, and matching it just repeats the mistake with a better warranty. You get one page with model numbers, capacities, what is removed, what is altered, and the price.