Air conditioning
Repair and replacement. Diagnostic first, quote second, and sized to the house rather than matched to whatever came out of it.
Houses built where the neighbourhood stops.
Hillside lots, canyon wind, open space over the back fence and a smoke season that everybody here plans around. The HVAC decisions that follow from that are different, and they are what we do.
The local brief
Four things that make a Conejo house its own problem.
None of these is exotic. They are ordinary conditions here and unusual almost everywhere else, and a contractor who works mostly on flat tract housing will not be looking for them.
- The slope
- Split levels stack heatWarm air rises, and a house that steps up a hillside gives it somewhere to go. The upper floor runs warm, the lower runs cold, and the thermostat is almost always on the wrong one of the two.
- The exposure
- No shade on the afternoon sideA hillside lot often has nothing between it and the low western sun. That is a heat source running for hours, every summer afternoon, and no amount of equipment is a cheap answer to it.
- The wind
- Canyon wind arrives from one direction, hardIt loads an outdoor coil with dust and dry plant matter, and it decides where an outdoor unit should and should not stand on an exposed lot.
- The edge
- Open space over the back fenceWhich brings smoke in season, and which is why attic ventilation here is a fire-safety detail as well as a moisture and heat detail.
What we do
Five services.
Residential first, with a light commercial side along the boulevard. Each one is written out in full on the services page, including what it does not cover.
Heat pumps
A mild winter is the condition heat pumps are best at, which makes this valley a genuinely good place for them. We will still tell you when the furnace you have is the better buy.
Ductwork & zoning
The real answer to a split-level house where one floor is always wrong. Sealing, rebuilding, adding returns, and zoning where the plan actually justifies it.
Attic ventilation & vents
Where we sit, attic venting is a heat question, a moisture question and a fire question at once. We replace vents, correct intake and exhaust balance, and work to what applies at your address.
Maintenance
Coil, drain, charge, electricals and filter, plus a look at the duct and the attic vents while we are up there. Written up with photographs of anything worth seeing.
What we don't do
No roofing, no solar, no window or shade contracting, no defensible-space clearance, no electrical panel upgrades. We flag what a job needs and name the trade that holds the licence.
The signature page
Smoke, embers and the wildland edge.
A central system can clean the air inside a closed house. It cannot seal a building, and anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you something. From the smoke page
Living on the edge of open space is most of the reason people move here and all of the reason smoke season is a fixture of the calendar. What a heating and air contractor can honestly contribute to that is narrower than the marketing suggests — and genuinely useful once you know where the boundary is.
- What filtration genuinely does, and the point at which a denser filter starts hurting you
- Ember-resistant attic vents, and how to find out what applies at your address
- Why an outside-air intake is a good idea most of the year and a bad one in September
- The one-room approach, and why it beats trying to clean the whole house
- What to do with the system during a smoke event, and what to do afterwards
- Four things we will not sell you, and why
The hillside problem
One floor is always wrong.
It is the most common complaint we get in this valley, and the answer is almost never a bigger machine.
A house that steps up a slope has a built-in chimney: warm air leaves the lower level and collects at the top. Add a west-facing wall with nothing shading it and a duct system that was balanced — if it was balanced at all — on a cool morning in a new build, and you get a house where the upstairs is uncomfortable from two in the afternoon and the downstairs is cold all winter.
A larger system makes that worse rather than better. It reaches the thermostat faster, shuts off sooner, and gives the far end of the duct run less time to receive anything at all. The fix is the run to the rooms that lose, the return air path, and — where the floor plan genuinely justifies it — zoning.
What we check before quoting zoning
Zoning is real engineering and it is easy to sell badly. It needs a system that can turn down when only one zone calls, duct that can carry the air where the dampers send it, and a bypass strategy that does not simply blow conditioned air back into the return. If those three are not in place, zoning makes a house louder and no more comfortable. We will tell you when that is the case.
How a job goes
Four steps.
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Call
Tell us which floor, which room and what time of day. That narrows it more than most people expect.
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Come and look
House, attic, duct, vents, panel and which walls take the afternoon. A flat diagnostic fee on repairs, credited against the work.
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Options in writing
Two or three routes, priced, with equipment and ductwork on separate lines and what each one will and will not change.
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The work
Dates agreed first. Permits pulled and the inspector met. Attic and side yard left as we found them.
Where we work
The valley and the canyons either side.
- Thousand Oaks
- Newbury Park
- Westlake Village
- Agoura Hills
- Oak Park
- Lake Sherwood
- Calabasas
- Camarillo
- Moorpark
- Simi Valley
On emergency cover
We do not advertise 24-hour service. A small shop cannot staff it honestly, and a promise that fails at two in the morning is worse than no promise at all.
What we do instead: the phone is answered from half past seven, overnight messages are returned first thing, and during a heat run we sort the day by who has no cooling at all in an occupied house.
Outside that list
Call anyway. If it is a short drive past the edge we will usually take it, and if it is not we will say so straight away rather than booking a visit we cannot service properly afterwards.
Common questions
Asked on nearly every visit.
Smoke gets into the house every time. Can HVAC fix that?
Partly, and it is worth being precise about which part. A central system can filter the air it circulates, which helps a great deal once the house is closed. What it cannot do is seal a building — most smoke arrives through gaps, vents and the simple fact of a leaky envelope, not through the ductwork. We do the filtration and the duct side properly and tell you honestly where the rest of the problem lives.
Should I just put the thickest filter I can find in?
No — that is the most common self-inflicted HVAC problem in this valley. A much denser filter in a slot sized for a thin one raises resistance across the blower, so the system moves less air, cools less well and in a bad case ices the indoor coil. Better filtration usually means more filter area rather than a denser filter in the same hole, and that sometimes means changing the housing.
What are ember-resistant attic vents and do I need them?
They are vents built and listed to resist the entry of wind-blown embers, and they are part of the wildland-urban interface construction rules that apply to a great many properties in this area. Whether they are required on your specific job depends on your address and the scope of work. We check what applies at permit time rather than quoting a rule from memory, because these requirements have been revised more than once.
Why is one side of my hillside house always worse?
Usually a combination of afternoon sun on a slope with nothing shading it, a split-level floor plan that lets warm air stack upward, and a duct run that was never balanced for either. It is a ductwork and zoning question far more often than an equipment question, and a larger machine tends to make it slightly worse.
Which areas do you cover?
Thousand Oaks, Newbury Park, Westlake Village, Agoura Hills, Oak Park, Calabasas, Camarillo, Moorpark and Simi Valley. That is the Conejo Valley and the canyons either side of it.
Tell us which room, and what time of day.
That one sentence usually tells us whether you are looking at a service, a duct job or a replacement conversation.