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Premises
Small retail, cafes, offices and light industrial across Alameda and the inner East Bay — much of it with somebody living upstairs.
And who is above you
Each unit gets the usual record: what it is, where it sits, roughly what age, how it is mounted, the condition of the penetration, filter sizes, electrical condition and the gas section.
On this island we add one line that most surveys leave out: what is above and beside the premises, and whether anybody lives there. A condenser on a rear wall is a machine to you and a bedroom wall to somebody else, and knowing that before a change-out is the difference between a routine job and a complaint to the city.
Twice a year
Spring, before the load
- Condenser coils cleaned properly rather than rinsed
- Charge verified by superheat and subcooling
- Belts, bearings and drive alignment where fitted
- Mounts and isolation checked, because they loosen
- Drains cleared and float switches tested
- Electrical connections torqued, contactors inspected
Autumn, before the cold
- Combustion tested on gas appliances, 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 that come up here constantly
Hours
A cafe’s equipment starts at five in the morning and there is a flat above it. Timers, staging and where the unit is mounted all matter more in that building than any efficiency figure.
Kitchen extract
A hood running with no make-up air pulls the whole building negative, and in a mixed-use building that means it is pulling air out of the flat upstairs. It is a comfort problem for them and a cost for you.
Mounting on old fabric
Brackets on a hundred-year-old wall transmit everything into the structure. Isolation at the fixing is not optional here, and it is the thing most often skipped on a cheap installation.
What we turn down
Commercial refrigeration and cold rooms, hood cleaning, chiller plant, building management systems on proprietary protocols, and anything that genuinely wants a controls engineer rather than a mechanical contractor.
We also turn down asbestos testing and removal, which are licensed activities and are not ours — and in buildings of this age we will stop and say so rather than work through unidentified material. And we will not interpret a city noise ordinance for you; we will give you the figures somebody can rule on.