No heat and no cooling are not the same emergency

Both go to licensed vendors. HVAC repair and HVAC replacement are two of the five trades where our network requires a current verified licence before dispatch — refrigerant handling is federally regulated and combustion appliances kill people when they are set up wrong, so this is not a category where we improvise.

Service work covers no-heat and no-cool diagnosis, capacitor and contactor failures, blower and ignition faults, refrigerant leak diagnosis, condensate drain blockages, thermostat replacement, and the seasonal maintenance that prevents most of the above. Filter discipline is the single cheapest thing that extends equipment life, and it is the thing most often skipped in rentals because nobody owns the task.

Replacement is where the money is and where the advice matters. A failed compressor on a fifteen-year-old system is usually the moment to replace rather than repair, but a failed capacitor on the same system is not. We will tell you which one you have, what the realistic remaining life is, and what a replacement actually costs to install in that property — including whether the existing ductwork and electrical will support what you are considering.

For multifamily, two things are worth knowing. Mini-splits often solve units that central systems serve badly, particularly additions and converted spaces, and they do it without new ductwork. And condensate drains are the most common cause of HVAC-related water damage we see — a blocked drain in an attic air handler will find the ceiling below it, and clearing it is a routine task nobody schedules.

Carbon monoxide is the one thing we will raise unprompted. If a vendor finds a cracked heat exchanger or an unsafe flue, the system gets shut down and you get told immediately, before any conversation about cost.