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For premises the winter question is continuity, not comfort
It is much cheaper to answer in October than in the week a freeze arrives, and the answer is usually smaller than people expect.
Small commercial across the north suburbs
Offices and suites
Business-park and corridor offices and professional suites. Rooftop packaged units and splits, zoning somebody reconfigured years ago, filter programmes and a written record per unit.
Clinics and treatment rooms
Rooms that must hold a temperature while somebody lies still in them, where draught and noise at the chair matter as much as the average reading, and where a failure cancels a day of appointments.
Retail units
Door-open trading, west glass and one unit expected to handle both. Honest conversations about air curtains and vestibules, including when they are not worth it for your door.
Restaurants and kitchens
Where hood exhaust and dining-room comfort are one problem. We measure the make-up air, because a room that cannot hold temperature at service usually has a building being pulled into a vacuum by its own hood.
Workshops and light industrial
Tall doors, high bays and a process that makes heat. Destratification, spot heating, extraction and make-up air, sized for how the space is actually worked.
Landlords and managers
Attend, diagnose, photograph, price, report, and authorise nothing without your written say-so. Annual condition surveys per unit across a portfolio.
The five-item list we go through with commercial clients
What stops if the heat stops
Unit by unit: does it close the business, make a space unworkable, put stock or equipment at risk, or simply annoy people? Four answers, four different arrangements, and three of them are cheaper than the one people assume.
Whether the backup heat works
On heat pumps, measured rather than assumed. Electric backup that has not run since last winter is the commonest thing to find missing, and it is the thing the building depends on in the one week that matters.
Where the water is
Condensate lines, traps and any pipework in an unheated roof space or on an exposed wall. A freeze does more damage through burst water than through failed heating, and that is not always an HVAC problem — we will say which parts are a plumber’s.
What comes back on by itself
After an outage, some equipment restarts and some sits in a lockout waiting for a person. A written note of which is which turns a Monday emergency into a two-minute job somebody on site can do.
What parts are worth holding
For the units where a failure actually stops something, which components fail and which come from out of state. That conversation does more for real downtime than any response clause.
Who to call for what
A plumber for burst water, an electrician for supply and surge, us for the equipment. Written down before the week nobody can think straight.
A schedule with named months, and a winter visit that is not a formality
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Two visits, not one
One before the cooling season and one before the heating season. In a market where heating is used for a few weeks a year, the autumn visit is the one that is usually skipped and the one that matters most.
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Backup heat operated and measured
Every stage run, amp draw checked against the nameplate, and the result written down. Not ticked.
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Readings entered against last year
Static pressure, airflow, charge against target, temperature split and combustion, with the outdoor conditions noted so the comparison means something.
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One document per site
Every unit, where it is, what it serves, its age from its serial number and its last readings. It is yours, and if you change contractor it goes with you.