A comfort system is for people. Equipment is a different question.
Heating, cooling and ventilation across Sunnyvale and the north valley. In this town a great many rooms contain something that gets hot and matters — a rack in a cupboard, a bench of test gear, a room full of machines — and the honest answer is frequently not the one that sells the most equipment.
Three measurements, and one question nobody else asks
The usual instruments
Static pressure across the filter and the coil, total airflow, refrigerant charge against the manufacturer’s target, temperature split, and combustion on anything that burns gas. Written down with the date and the conditions.
The heat being made in the room
Where there is equipment, we add up what it is actually producing — it is on the labels, in watts — before anybody sizes anything. A rack is a heater with a known output, which makes this the easiest load in the trade to get right and one of the most often guessed.
Who set the temperature
If a room has a number attached to it, that number comes from the manufacturer, the supplier or an insurer, not from us. We will ask for it in writing, and if nobody has it we will say so rather than invent one.
There is a cupboard full of equipment and it is cooking
Five kinds of room with something hot in it, crossed with the four situations they turn up in. What a comfort system can and cannot do for equipment, why a ductless head is usually the answer and occasionally is not, where the temperature number should come from — and the one case where this is not our trade at all.
Houses
Post-war ranch stock across the flats, mid-century tracts with the original ducts under the floor or in the roof, newer townhouses and condominiums, and a great many houses with a converted garage or a back room that has become an office with far more equipment in it than anybody planned for.
Premises
Offices and suites along the El Camino and Mathilda corridors, light industrial and R&D units, small laboratories and workshops, and the shops and restaurants in between. Almost all of them have at least one room whose problem is equipment rather than people.
The work, plainly
- Diagnosis with instruments
Pressure, airflow, charge, temperature split and combustion, written down with the date and the conditions.
- Repair, costed first
What it is, what it costs, and what it does not fix. Replacement is discussed after a repair has a number against it.
- Load calculation and replacement
Room by room, on the building as it stands, with any equipment load counted rather than guessed.
- Ductless for single rooms
The usual right answer for a room that needs its own temperature. Sized from the load, sited where it can be serviced, condensate given a fall it can use.
- Duct repair, sealing and balancing
Leakage measured, joints sealed, returns added, registers set against a measured target rather than by hand on a vent.
- Ventilation and extraction
Extract at the source where heat is being made, measured before and after.
- Gas appliance safety
Combustion analysis, heat exchanger inspection, flue checked as installed, carbon monoxide alarms fitted where there is none.
- Commercial surveys and maintenance
Every unit mapped to what it serves, the same readings each visit, in a form a landlord, a tenant or an inspector can use.
What we will not do
| We will not | Why |
|---|---|
| Take on a real data room | Rooms with uptime requirements need redundancy, monitoring, alarms and a maintenance regime that belongs to precision cooling specialists. We will say so on the first visit rather than sell you a comfort unit and let you discover it in August. |
| Invent a temperature specification | If equipment needs a number, that number comes from whoever made it or insures it. We will measure against the number. We will not supply one. |
| Cool a room that is being heated by a machine | Not before we have looked at extracting the heat at its source, which is nearly always cheaper and more effective. Cooling it instead is paying twice. |
| Condemn a heat exchanger without showing you | It is a real reason to shut a furnace down and the most abused finding in this trade. You get the camera image or the combustion reading, and you are welcome to a second opinion. |
| Recommend replacement on age alone | Age changes the arithmetic on a repair. It is not a fault. |
| Quote a price before we have seen it | A figure given on the telephone is a guess dressed as a quote, and it is always a low one. |
| Publish reviews, ratings or a founding date | There are none on this site because we are not going to invent any. |
Asked often enough to write down
Our comms cupboard overheats. Do we need a cooling unit in it?
Perhaps not, and it is worth ten minutes to find out. Electrical equipment turns very nearly all the power it draws into heat, so add up the labels: a rack pulling a kilowatt is a one-kilowatt heater. If the number is small, a louvred door and a path for the warm air to leave may be the whole answer. If it is large, or the cupboard is isolated from the conditioned space, a dedicated unit sized from the watts is right. What decides it is the figure, not the floor area, and the figure is printed on the equipment.
The room is fine on a weekday and unbearable at the weekend. Why?
Because the building system is switching off and the equipment is not. That single mismatch causes about half the complaints we are called to in rooms like this. A comfort system is designed to stop when the room is comfortable, and a room whose occupant is a machine has no such thing as comfortable. The usual answer is a small dedicated unit that runs on its own schedule all year, rather than any change to the main system.
What temperature should the room be held at?
We will not tell you, and we would be careful of a contractor who does. Where equipment or stock has a requirement, the number comes from the manufacturer, the supplier or an insurer. Ask for it in writing. Once it exists we will design to it, measure against it and log it. Without it, anything anybody designs is a guess made on your behalf.
Can you cool our server room?
That depends entirely on what happens if it is warm for a day. If the answer is that somebody shrugs, then yes, and it is a straightforward job. If the answer is that it is a business event, then no — a room that cannot be allowed to stop needs redundancy, monitoring, an alarm that reaches a person at three in the morning and a maintenance regime built around never stopping, and that is a precision cooling specialist rather than a comfort contractor. We will tell you which you have at the first visit, measure the load so you have a real figure, and not quote it.
Our home office is always warmer than the rest of the house. What is it?
Usually the room being starved rather than under-cooled. It gets supply air, the door is shut for eight hours, the air has no way back out, pressure builds and the airflow collapses. A transfer grille or an undercut door is a twenty-minute fix and it is the commonest finding we make. After that: the airflow measured at the register against what the room needs now that there is equipment in it, and solar control if it faces west.
Our workshop has a machine that heats the whole room. More cooling?
Extraction at the source first, every time. Taking the heat away where it is made is cheaper and more effective than removing it from the room afterwards, and cooling a room that a machine is heating is paying for the same energy twice. A canopy or local extract over the source, screening of hot surfaces and directed air movement at the work positions come before whole-room cooling. Where the extraction is dealing with fumes or dust rather than heat, that is a laboratory ventilation and industrial hygiene question and we will say so.
Which areas do you cover?
Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Milpitas and north San Jose.
417 San Aleso Ave
Sunnyvale, CA 94085. Monday to Friday, 8am to 5pm.
We cover Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Santa Clara, Cupertino, Los Altos, Palo Alto, Milpitas and north San Jose.