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Heating, cooling and humidity for Centennial houses
Gas furnaces, air conditioning, evaporative coolers, heat pumps, ductwork and the dry-air questions that come with a Colorado winter.
Checked in the order that costs you least
This is the order we work in, and it is deliberate — the things at the top fail most often and cost the least to put right.
Power and controls
Breaker, the service switch beside the furnace that looks like a light switch, the door interlock, and the thermostat with its batteries and its schedule.
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.
Ignition and sensing
Igniter, flame sensor, pressure switch and the condensate trap on a high-efficiency furnace. Most genuine faults live here.
Capacitor and contactor
On an outdoor unit in summer, the two cheapest parts and the two that fail most.
Valve, board, compressor
Last, because they fail least and cost most. If we get there you see the reading that proves it.
Heat exchanger
Inspected on every no-heat call whatever the fault was. A cracked one ends the visit — shut off and tagged, no repair attempted.
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.
Dry air, and its limit
Winters here are genuinely dry and humidification genuinely helps. What decides how far you can go is the coldest surface in the house, which is almost always a window — and the first sign you have gone past it is water on the glass.
Altitude
The input rating stamped on a gas appliance is a sea-level figure. Some manufacturers require an orifice kit above a stated elevation, some specify a manifold pressure change, and some certify across a range with no change at all.
Which applies is in that model’s own installation instructions, so we read the model number off the plate and check rather than assume.
Evaporative cooling
Still the right machine in plenty of houses here. It brings outdoor air in, which is why it needs a relief opening left open — and the commonest complaint about them, a house that goes muggy, is almost always because that path got closed up.
The finished basement
Usually got supply registers and no return, so it runs cold in winter, stuffy in summer, and pulls the rest of the house out of balance. Adding a return is cheaper than any equipment and it fixes both seasons.
What a quote is built from
- A room-by-room heat loss and heat gain calculation from the actual construction and orientation — 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.
- The venting. Going to a high-efficiency appliance changes it completely, and on a flue shared with a water heater it changes that too.
- The electrical supply, read off the plate of the proposed unit.
- One page with model numbers, capacities, what is removed, what is altered, and the price — plus the commissioning figures afterwards.