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What we do, facility by facility and house by house.
Commercial facilities first, then homes, then the three kinds of work that run through both — heating, ventilation and maintenance. Adding cooling has its own page.
Commercial facilities
CommercialOffices, schools, clinics, older buildings, light industrial and multi-family.
The commercial side of the business is facility work in the proper sense: several systems, several stakeholders, and a building that has to keep operating while the work is done.
Older downtown and Stadium District buildings
Brick and concrete buildings heated by steam or hot-water radiators, with cooling — if any — added tenant by tenant. The work here is usually to replace the patchwork with something coherent without disturbing the fabric of a building that may be decades older than any of its equipment.
Offices and clinics
Rooftop packaged units and split systems, often of mixed ages. Clinics add ventilation and filtration requirements that matter as much as temperature. Work is scheduled out of hours.
Schools
Classrooms built for heating, now hot in June and September. Work is planned into breaks; proposals are written for facilities departments and boards.
Light industrial and warehousing
Workshops and warehouses in the Tideflats, Fife and along the valley, where the priority is often ventilation and spot cooling rather than full air conditioning.
Multi-family
Apartment buildings where every tenant has bought their own portable unit and the electrical service is carrying all of them. The alternative is a planned building-wide approach, and that conversation starts with the owner.
Homes
ResidentialCraftsman houses, ramblers, townhomes and rentals.
Tacoma's housing is mostly heated one of four ways — a gas furnace, an oil furnace, electric baseboards or an old hot-water system — and almost none of it was built with cooling. The questions homeowners bring us are consistent:
- "Can we add cooling without ducts?"
- Yes, usually with ductless heads. The trade-offs are where the indoor units go, how many are needed, and where the outdoor unit and the condensate can go.
- "Should the furnace become a heat pump?"
- Often a good idea in this climate, sometimes not. It depends on the ductwork, the electrical service and how the house is used.
- "Is our panel big enough?"
- We check before quoting. If it is not, you will hear it from us before you find out from an electrician halfway through the job.
- "Will the outdoor unit bother the neighbours?"
- Placement matters — setbacks, bedroom windows next door, and the side of the house it sits on. We plan it rather than put it wherever is easiest.
Every home visit starts with drop cloths and ends with a written price. Nothing billable happens before you have agreed to it.
Heating
Still most of the job, most of the year.
Cooling gets the attention, but in this climate heating runs for far more of the year. We repair, service and replace boilers, gas and oil furnaces and heat pumps, in commercial buildings and homes.
- Boilers and hot-water systems — in older buildings and houses, including the pumps, valves and controls around them.
- Gas furnaces — with combustion and the full venting path checked on every visit.
- Oil furnaces — service, and honest advice about conversion when the time comes.
- Heat pumps — including their behaviour in the cold, damp spells when defrost cycles run most.
Ventilation
Fresh air on purpose, in a damp climate.
The Puget Sound winter is long, mild and wet. Buildings that are tightened up — new windows, weatherstripping, closed up to hold cooling in summer — can lose the air changes they used to get by accident. The signs are condensation on windows, stale air, lingering smells and, eventually, mould.
The answer is to bring outside air in deliberately, where it can be filtered and tempered. Heat-recovery and energy-recovery ventilators do that while recovering much of the heat from the outgoing air. In commercial kitchens and workshops, make-up air replaces what exhaust fans remove.
We do not make health claims for ventilation or filtration. We will tell you what the equipment does and does not do, and leave medical questions to people qualified to answer them.
Maintenance
A record that stays with the building.
Scheduled visits per unit — heating before autumn, cooling before summer, ventilation filters on their own cycle. Each visit records its readings, so the next one can be compared with it and a drift noticed before it becomes a failure.
For facilities, that record is kept per unit and handed over with the building if management changes. For homes, it is a short written note after every visit that you keep.
Start with a site visit.
Facility or house. We will tell you what the visit involves and what it costs before anyone comes out.