The cheapest cooling in this valley arrives at nine at night.
Heating, cooling and ventilation across Fairfield and Solano County. This is one of the few places in California where the evening genuinely does the work for you — and one of the few places where a contractor can honestly tell a household to buy less equipment rather than more. We measure the building first, and it changes the answer more often than you would expect.
Measure the building, then price the equipment
In that order, because in this climate the building decides more than the equipment does. A week of logging costs very little and it regularly saves people a great deal.
A week of temperatures
Indoors and outdoors, logged through the nights as well as the afternoons. It shows whether the house is still holding yesterday’s heat at seven in the morning, which is the single number that decides what this building actually needs.
The usual instruments
Static pressure across the filter and the coil, total airflow, refrigerant charge against the manufacturer’s target, temperature split, and a combustion analysis on anything that burns gas. Written down with the date and the conditions.
An answer in two parts
What the equipment needs doing, and what the building could do instead. You get both figures. Where the cheaper one is genuinely the better one, we will say so, and we will say when it is not.
Can we just use the night air?
Five kinds of building crossed with four situations, and an honest answer for each. Where night cooling works, where it does not, what it costs to do properly, and the one condition under which everything on the page reverses and the building should be shut up tight.
Houses
Tract housing across Rancho Solano, Green Valley and the north side built in long uniform stretches, older stock in the centre and in Suisun City, and newer well-sealed houses that behave completely differently from either. The climate is hot dry days and a real drop overnight, which is a gift and is also why so many systems here are larger than they needed to be.
Working buildings
Distribution and storage along the Cordelia corridor, light manufacturing and workshops, offices and medical suites around the town centre, and retail and restaurants on the main routes. Tall buildings here have the same night-air opportunity as houses do, and almost none of them are set up to use it.
The work, plainly
- Diagnosis with instruments
Pressure, airflow, charge, temperature split and combustion, written down with the date and the conditions they were taken in.
- Temperature logging
A week of indoor and outdoor readings before anybody prices capacity. Cheap, quick, and it frequently changes the recommendation.
- 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. Oversizing is the commonest fault we measure in this valley.
- Attic duct sealing and insulation
Leakage measured, joints sealed, runs insulated. On a house with the ducts in a very hot attic this is often worth more than new equipment.
- Ventilation and night cooling
Whole-house fans, powered ventilation and controls, sized and installed properly — and an honest answer when a building is not suited to them.
- 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 |
|---|---|
| Promise a percentage saving | Nobody can, honestly. It depends on the building, the summer, how the household lives and what the utility does next. We will tell you what we measured and what changed. We will not put a percentage on a quote. |
| Say whether the air is safe to breathe | On a smoke day, the official air quality reading is the answer and it is free. We are not an air quality authority, we will not make health claims, and we will not tell you when to open the house. |
| Sell a whole-house fan as a substitute for cooling | It is not one. It is a different tool that works brilliantly on some buildings and badly on others, and on a genuinely hot week it does not replace a system. We will tell you which you have. |
| Oversize a system to be safe | An oversized unit cools quickly, shuts off, never runs long enough to move the air around the house, and costs more to buy and to run. It is the commonest fault we measure here and it is always somebody’s idea of being careful. |
| 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. |
| 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
Is a whole-house fan really worth it here?
On the right building, yes, and this is one of the few parts of California where that is true. Inland Solano County gets hot dry afternoons and evenings that drop away properly, so a building able to take in a large volume of cool air for six hours has done a real share of the next day’s work for nothing. Whether yours can is a question about the building rather than the weather — the exhaust path, the attic venting, the window area and whether anybody will shut it all at the right time in the morning. We measure before we recommend, and on some houses the answer is no.
What is the one number that decides it?
The indoor temperature at seven in the morning. A house that has shed its heat overnight starts the day level and the system only has to handle the afternoon. A house that is still warm at seven is carrying yesterday forward and every day compounds. That number is invisible without a logger, it costs very little to get, and it changes the recommendation often enough that we will not price capacity without it.
Will it save us money?
It should, and we will not put a percentage on it, because nobody can honestly. It depends on the building, on the summer, on how the household lives and on what the utility does next. What we will do is give you the measurements before and the measurements after, which is a real answer rather than a marketing one. Anybody quoting you a percentage on a heating and cooling job has made it up.
Should we run the fan when there is wildfire smoke?
No. During a smoke event the whole strategy reverses: keep the building shut, do not run a whole-house fan, run the cooling on recirculation if you have it, and use the best filter your system can take without losing the airflow it needs. A whole-house fan moves an enormous volume of outside air through the building quickly, which is exactly what makes it useful in July and exactly what makes it wrong on a smoke day. We will not tell you when it is safe to open up again — the official air quality reading is the answer and it is free.
Our upstairs is always hotter. Is the system too small?
Usually not. A single system serving both floors is doing two different jobs, because the upstairs gains heat through the roof all afternoon while the downstairs does not. We measure the two floors separately at the hour the complaint happens rather than in the morning. The answer is sometimes a damper and a rebalance, frequently duct sealing in a very hot attic, and occasionally a second system. What is almost never the answer is simply more capacity pushed through the same ducts.
Do you do smaller systems than other companies quote?
Sometimes, and it is not a sales position. Oversizing is the commonest fault we measure in this valley, and it happens because somebody wanted to be safe. An oversized unit cools quickly, shuts off, never runs long enough to move air around the house, and costs more to buy and to run. We size from a room-by-room load calculation on the building as it stands, and where that number is smaller than what is currently installed we will show you the working.
Which areas do you cover?
Fairfield, Suisun City, Vacaville, Cordelia, Green Valley, Benicia, Dixon and Vallejo.
1972 N Texas St
Fairfield, CA 94533. Monday to Friday, 7am to 4pm.
We cover Fairfield, Suisun City, Vacaville, Cordelia, Green Valley, Benicia, Dixon and Vallejo.