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Heating and cooling for Syracuse houses
Gas furnaces and boilers, steam and hot water, cooling added where there are ducts and where there are not. Long winters, and a lot of equipment older than anybody thinks.
No heat
Diagnosed from the cheap end. This is the order we work in, and it is deliberate.
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 rather than finding something else.
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 it 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 zones
On a boiler, a zone cold while the others are warm is almost never the boiler — it is a circulator, a zone valve, a thermostat wire or an air lock.
Gas valve and board
Checked last because they fail least and cost most. If we get there you see the reading that proves it before anything is ordered.
Heat exchanger, every visit
Inspected on every no-heat call whatever the fault turned out to be. A cracked one ends the visit — shut off and tagged, no repair attempted, and no pressure to sign anything that day.
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 long winter does
Condensate and cold space
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. It is 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. We measure static pressure and the airflow at that register, which turns an argument into two numbers.
Before you replace anything
What a replacement 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. Equipment fitted before about 2000 was routinely far too big.
- The measured capacity of the existing ducts. If they cannot carry what the new equipment needs, better equipment makes the house worse, and that goes in the quote either way.
- 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 and compared with the circuit that is there.
- One page with model numbers, capacities, what is removed, what is altered, and the price — plus the commissioning figures afterwards.