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Cooling, ducts and moisture for Pearland houses
A cooling season that runs most of the year, plant in the attic, and a grid that tests it every summer.
No cooling, checked cheapest first
This is the order we work in. The things at the top fail most often here and cost the least.
Capacitor and contactor
The two cheapest parts on an outdoor unit and the two that fail most — especially after an electrical event. A unit that hums but will not start is usually one of them.
A blocked coil
Pollen, grass and construction dust load a condenser fast in a developing area. It quietly halves what the unit can do and raises the bill every hour it runs.
Condensate
A blocked drain trips the float switch and the system stops with nothing apparently wrong. In an attic that switch is all that stands between you and a ceiling.
Low charge
Measured, not topped up on sight. Refrigerant is not consumed — a system that wants more every year is leaking, and the leak is the job.
A frozen coil
Low airflow or low charge. Switch cooling off, leave the fan running, and call. Running a compressor with a frozen coil is how compressors fail.
The thermostat
Batteries, wiring, settings — and whether it lost its programme in the last outage. A share of calls genuinely end here and we say so.
Attic plant, humid air
Cool and clammy
A system that is too big cools the air fast, satisfies the thermostat in minutes and never runs long enough to take moisture out. On this coast that is the difference between comfortable and miserable at the same temperature.
It is also why replacing a system with a bigger one usually makes the complaint worse.
Return-side duct leakage
The expensive one. A leaking return pulls superheated, humid attic air straight into the system, and you pay to cool and dry it every hour it runs. Leakage is a measurement, not an inspection — a look from the hatch tells you about the two feet somebody could see.
The condensate chain
Primary drain, trap, secondary pan and float switch. In an attic installation the switch is the cheapest insurance in the building, and a ceiling stain very often means there was not one, or somebody bypassed it to keep the cooling running.
And the electrical side
Surge protection, measured voltage, and a raised and strapped outdoor unit. On this coast that is a flooding and a wind question as much as an airflow one.
Heating and replacement
Short winters, real freezes
Gas furnaces are combustion tested with an analyser and the readings written down. On a heat pump, the defrost cycle and the auxiliary heat are both checked — a heat pump running on strip heat through a cold snap will keep the house warm and produce a bill nobody can explain, and nothing alerts you.
What a replacement quote is built from
- A room-by-room heat gain and heat loss calculation — not floor area and not the old unit’s rating.
- The measured capacity of the existing ducts.
- The condensate route, the pans and the float switch.
- The electrical supply, read off the plate of the proposed unit.
- One page with model numbers, capacities, what is removed, what is altered, and the price.
Gas, or a carbon monoxide alarm
Do not ring a contractor first. Get everybody out of the house and, from outside, call 911 and your gas utility’s emergency line. They arrive faster than any contractor, they do not charge you for a false alarm, and making the property safe is their job. Ring us afterwards — finding out why it happened is ours.
Commissioning, late
Balancing the airflow room by room and verifying the charge under real conditions is the step skipped at handover on a production house. It can be done afterwards, it costs a fraction of replacement, and it is the best money available on a house you intend to keep.