- Home
- Homes
Houses of every era across the CSRA
Augusta, Martinez, Evans, Grovetown and across the river. Breakdowns, replacements, ducts and the humidity that decides whether a house is comfortable or merely cold.
When it has stopped
Heat pumps, gas furnaces, air handlers and straight air conditioning, any make. We find the fault, say what it costs to put right, and say plainly when the money is better spent elsewhere.
Two things are worth thirty seconds before you call: the breaker, and the condensate float switch. A tripped float switch is the system doing exactly what it was fitted to do, and from the room it looks identical to a breakdown.
Where we find a compromised heat exchanger on a gas appliance it gets shut off rather than repaired. That is not a negotiation and it never will be.
What we usually find, and when it was built
The same four eras as the home page, but this time the specific residential faults rather than the general picture.
Retrofitted everything
- Return air far too small, because a return is the hard half to retrofit
- Ducts routed through closets and crawlspaces along whatever path was easy
- Rooms the system has never reached properly, usually the ones furthest from the plant
- Plaster walls that rule out cheap modification, which pushes the honest answer towards ductless or small-duct
Original ducts, third set of equipment
- Duct joints that have never been sealed in sixty years
- Crawlspace runs sitting in a humid space for eight months of the year
- A blower that was never set for this house
- Attic insulation that is the cheapest remaining improvement by a distance
Flex duct, and back-up heat nobody notices
- Flex crushed against a truss, kinked at a bend, or sagging between straps
- Torn jackets and slumped insulation on attic runs
- Electric back-up heat coming on when it should not — expensive, and completely silent
- R-22 systems, where the refrigerant is now a real part of the cost of any large repair
Oversized, and damp because of it
- Equipment larger than the house needs, so it never runs long enough to dehumidify
- Zoning added to ductwork that was not designed for it
- Smart thermostats fitted without checking what the equipment expects
- Systems now at the age where the repair-or-replace question genuinely arrives
What happens before we quote one
- A load calculation for your houseRoom by room, from orientation, glazing, shading, insulation and how the house is used. Not from the badge on the old unit, which may have been wrong when it was fitted.
- Static pressure measuredAgainst the blower’s own rating. If the ducts cannot carry the new airflow, that belongs in the quotation rather than in a conversation afterwards.
- The ductwork actually looked atAttic and crawlspace runs, joints, returns and the plenum. Sealing gets priced, or it gets explicitly excluded. It never gets left silent.
- Condensate reviewedDrain, trap, slope and float switch. In a Georgia summer this is the item that saves a ceiling.
- Permit filedWith the Richmond County or municipal office covering your address, and named in the quotation.
- Commissioned with numbersAirflow, temperature rise or split, static pressure and charge, written down and left with you.
Cold and still uncomfortable
Cooling removes moisture only while it runs. A system with more capacity than the house needs satisfies the thermostat before it has run long enough to take the moisture out, so the house gets cold and stays damp. Turning the thermostat down makes it colder and damper and costs more.
Blower speed, return sizing, duct leakage into a hot attic and where the thermostat sits are all worth measuring before anybody proposes equipment. Several of them cost nothing to correct.
What we will not do is make claims about health. We find water where it should not be and we stop it; what damp might be growing and what that does to anybody is a question for people qualified to answer it.