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Shops and restaurants along Firestone and Lakewood, small offices, clinics and light industrial across south-east Los Angeles County.
Written down, once, properly
Each unit: what it is, where it sits, roughly what age, the condition of the curb and the roof penetration, whether the economiser travels, the filter size it really takes, the state of the electrical connections, and what the gas section looks like.
Readings go against the unit rather than the building. That is what turns a pile of invoices into a record, and what makes a drifting machine visible before it stops on the hottest Saturday of the year.
Twice a year
Spring, before the cooling load
- Condenser coils cleaned properly rather than rinsed
- Charge verified by superheat and subcooling
- Belts, bearings and drive alignment
- Economiser dampers opened and proved to travel
- Drains cleared and float switches tested
- Electrical connections torqued, contactors inspected
Autumn, before the first cold night
- Combustion tested on gas sections, figures recorded
- Heat exchangers inspected
- Flue and combustion air checked as installed
- Defrost proved on heat pumps
- Filters replaced with ones that fit the rack
- Readings compared against spring and the drift noted
Three things we find in almost every unit
No make-up air
A hood extracting hard with nothing bringing air back holds the whole unit at negative pressure. The front door pulls, the dining room is never warm in winter, and every degree of conditioning goes out through the roof.
The economiser nobody has opened
Free cooling from outside air, available here for a good part of the year. It seizes quietly, and because the unit still cools nobody notices until somebody opens it.
A unit sized for a shell
Rooftop units get specified before anybody knows what the space will be. A unit chosen for open retail and occupied by a taqueria is mismatched rather than faulty, and it wants a survey rather than a repair.
What we turn down
Chiller plant, building management systems on proprietary protocols, hood cleaning, commercial refrigeration, and anything that genuinely wants a controls engineer rather than a mechanical contractor. We say so at the survey rather than after the second visit, and where we can we will tell you who does take it on.
We also turn down a maintenance contract on a building we have not surveyed.