Serving Edina
Edina splits neatly into two housing stories, and they need almost opposite things. The mid-century houses have too much glass and not enough insulation. The rebuilds have a beautifully tight envelope and not enough fresh air.
Sizing, ductwork and the right equipment all follow from what kind of house it is, so this is where every job actually starts.
Low rooflines, wide single-glazed or early double-glazed window walls, radiant slab in some of them, and comfort that is dominated by glass rather than by the equipment. Load calculations here are unusually sensitive to window schedule.
Tudor and colonial revivals with plaster walls, original leaded glass and a long history of careful upgrades. The challenge is doing modern work without touching anything visible.
Large, very well air sealed, often with several zones and a mechanical room that was properly designed. These houses need mechanical ventilation, humidity control and balanced zoning far more than they need raw heating capacity.
In rough order of frequency, from our own dispatch board rather than from a keyword list.
A well-sealed new build stops ventilating itself. HRV and ERV sizing, commissioning and flow measurement is a much bigger share of what we do in Edina than anywhere else on this list.
A mid-century living room with a south-facing glass wall can swing fifteen degrees between morning and afternoon. That is a zoning and shading conversation, not a tonnage one.
Several zones, several dampers, and a control strategy nobody has looked at since installation. Rebalancing usually beats replacing.
Bypass humidifiers cannot hold a setpoint in four thousand square feet. Steam is normally the honest answer here, and we will say so.
The mid-century houses in Edina are the most interesting load calculations we do. When a third of a wall is glass, the window schedule dominates the result, and the standard shortcut of estimating from floor area produces a number that is wrong by a wide margin in both directions depending on orientation.
On the newer rebuilds, the recurring conversation is that the house is doing exactly what it was designed to do and the ventilation was value-engineered out or never commissioned. Measuring the actual flow rates is usually the whole diagnosis.
15 to 30 minutes from our Whittier office
Tell us the address and which room is wrong. If a van is already nearby, we will often get to you sooner than the window we quote.