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Premises
Shops, offices, clinics, a few restaurants and light industrial across north Orange County. Mostly rooftop packaged units on buildings with no written record at all.
What we write down before quoting
Each unit gets an entry: what it is, where it sits, roughly what age, the condition of the curb and roof penetration, whether the economiser actually travels, the filter size it really takes, the state of the electrical connections, and what the gas section looks like where there is one.
That record belongs to the building. If you move on it goes to whoever takes it over, and if you put the building on the market it is something to show.
Twice a year, recorded against the unit
Spring
- Condenser coils cleaned properly rather than rinsed
- Charge verified by superheat and subcooling
- Belts, bearings and drive alignment
- Economiser dampers opened and proved to travel
- Drains cleared and float switches tested
- Electrical connections torqued, contactors inspected
Autumn
- Combustion tested on gas sections, figures recorded
- Heat exchangers inspected
- Flue and combustion air checked as installed, not as drawn
- Defrost proved on heat pumps
- Filters replaced with ones that fit the rack
- Readings compared against spring and the drift noted
And what they cost you
The seized economiser
Free cooling from outside air, which on this coast is available for a large part of the year. It is also the part that seizes, and because the unit still cools nobody notices. We open and prove them every visit.
Extract with no make-up air
A kitchen hood or a big restroom fan with nothing bringing air back holds the unit at negative pressure. The front door pulls hard, the space is never warm in winter, and the conditioned air you paid for goes out through the roof.
Commercial work needs permits too
Replacing a rooftop unit is a permitted job, and on a commercial building there may be structural and electrical questions attached to it. We price that in at the survey rather than discovering it on the day.
What we turn down
Chiller plant, building management systems on proprietary protocols, and anything that genuinely wants a controls engineer rather than a mechanical contractor. We say so at the survey rather than after the second visit, and where we can we will tell you who does take it on.
We also turn down a maintenance contract on a building we have not surveyed. Signing a schedule for equipment nobody has looked at is how you end up paying to maintain the two units that were fine.