Small, residential only, and mostly working on houses older than we are

Why a company this size

There is a version of this business that grows. You take on twelve vans, you put a call centre between the customer and the technician, and you start paying commission on equipment sold. It works, and it is most of the trade in this city, and the predictable result is that a flame sensor call becomes a furnace replacement conversation more often than the furnaces deserve.

We went the other way. Four technicians is the number where the person who quotes the job is the person who does it, where Marguerite knows which house is which by the address, and where nobody is paid a percentage of what they sell you. It caps how much work we can take in January, which is a genuine cost, and we would rather pay it.

The houses here are the interesting part

Most of what we work on was built between 1900 and 1955. Balloon-framed foursquares with no wall cavity to run a duct through. Bungalows where the only return is a grille in the hallway floor. Victorians in Saint Paul where the third floor has never once been the same temperature as the second. Post-war ramblers with ducts that were sized for a smaller furnace than the one somebody fitted in 1998.

This is why we do load calculations rather than reading nameplates. In a house like these, the equipment that was there before is evidence of what a previous contractor guessed, and not much else.

What we are careful about

Carbon monoxide, because it is the one thing in this trade that kills people and the one diagnosis most often misused to sell a furnace. Every heating visit gets a combustion analysis and a CO reading, and when we find a heat exchanger problem we photograph it and show you.

Sizing, because an oversized system is a permanent, expensive, uncomfortable mistake that is very hard to undo. And humidity settings, because a humidifier left at one number all winter quietly rots window sills, and nobody connects the two.