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Heating and cooling for Rochester houses
Gas furnaces and boilers, central air, heat pumps and ductwork — with an instrument on every visit and the readings written down.
No heat, checked cheapest first
This is the order we actually work in, and it is deliberate — the rungs at the top fail most often and cost the least.
Power and controls
Breaker, the emergency switch at the head of the basement stairs, the switch on the appliance, and the thermostat with its batteries. A real share of first-cold-night calls end here and we say so.
Filter and airflow
A blocked filter trips the limit switch: the furnace lights, heats, shuts down and locks out. It reads exactly like a failure and costs nothing to rule out.
Ignition and flame sensing
Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch and the condensate trap on a condensing appliance. Most genuine faults live here and most are inexpensive.
Circulators and zone valves
On a boiler, a zone cold while the others are warm is almost never the boiler.
Gas valve, board, and the exchanger
Checked last because they fail least and cost most. The heat exchanger is inspected on every no-heat call whatever the fault was — a cracked one ends the visit, shut off and tagged.
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 is ours.
What a Rochester winter adds
Freezing condensate
A high-efficiency furnace or boiler produces water, and a line run through a cold crawlspace, garage or against an outside wall freezes. The appliance stops on a safety and it looks exactly like a failure.
Rerouting it is a small job and it is permanent. Worth doing before a February morning rather than during one.
Outdoor units and snow
A heat pump or condenser at ground level spends part of every winter partly buried, and defrost water has to be able to leave the base rather than freeze underneath it. Raised mounting is not an upgrade here, it is the correct installation.
The room that never keeps up
Nearly always airflow — a branch added during a remodel, a crushed run, a damper closed years ago, or a return far too small for the rooms it serves. We measure static pressure and the airflow at that register and at one that works.
That turns an argument into two numbers on a page.
Replacing something
What a quote is built from
- A room-by-room heat loss calculation from the actual construction, glazing and insulation — not floor area and not the old unit’s rating.
- The measured capacity of the existing ducts. If they cannot carry what the new equipment needs, better equipment makes the house worse.
- The venting. Going to a high-efficiency appliance changes it completely, and on a chimney shared with a water heater it changes that too.
- The electrical supply, read off the plate of the proposed unit.
- One page with model numbers, capacities, what is removed, what is altered, and the price — plus the commissioning figures afterwards, which is the part almost nobody hands over.