Heat pumps, furnaces & no-heat repair — Richmond & the Lower Mainland
Heat pumps, furnaces and air conditioning for Richmond, Vancouver and the Lower Mainland — sized with a Manual J load calculation instead of a guess, with a written repair-or-replace recommendation you keep, and the rebate paperwork handled for you.
Why comfort calls go wrong
Most homeowners get one quote, one recommendation and no explanation. The system that ends up in the mechanical room is the one that was on the truck that week — sized by rule of thumb, in a house nobody measured.
Your furnace is at the end of its expected life and made a noise last Tuesday. Repair it or replace it? Almost nobody will put that answer in writing — because one of those two numbers is a lot bigger than the other.
A technician who spends twelve minutes in your mechanical room is not diagnosing anything. Static pressure, refrigerant charge, flame sensor, blower amp draw — the answer lives in those readings, not on a sales sheet.
Every August, and every August someone offers to sell you a bigger unit. It is rarely an equipment problem: it is starved returns, leaking ducts in an unconditioned attic, and a system that only knows full-blast or off.
CleanBC and utility heat-pump programs move real money back to homeowners — but pre-approval, eligible equipment lists and post-install documentation defeat most people. Miss one step and the cheque never arrives.
What we do
Cold-climate heat pumps, high-efficiency gas furnaces and dual-fuel systems that hand off between the two when it drops toward freezing. Every install is sized with a Manual J load calculation, commissioned with airflow and refrigerant-charge readings, and documented — so the equipment matches the house it went into, not the one before it.
Book a free comfort auditNo heat, cold air at the registers, a furnace short-cycling or locking out at 11 PM. We diagnose before we quote — flame sensor, igniter, pressure switch, limit, ECM blower — and carry the parts that actually fail.
Call the no-heat lineHalf of every comfort complaint lives in the ducts, not the equipment. We measure static pressure, seal and rebalance the duct system, add returns where airflow is starved, and step filtration up to MERV 11–13 for smoke season. HRV installs and service for tight new builds, condensate lines cleared before they back up, and annual plans that keep manufacturer warranties valid and efficiency where you paid for it.
How it works
Twenty points, room-by-room temperatures, duct and airflow assessment. Sixty to ninety minutes, no charge, no pitch.
Manual J sizing, then good / better / best in writing with efficiency ratings and operating-cost estimates beside each.
Floor protection down, old equipment hauled away, new system commissioned — airflow, static pressure and charge recorded on your report.
We file the rebate paperwork and follow it through, then check in at the first seasonal changeover to verify it is running the way we left it.
“If your system has five good years left in it, we will tell you that in writing — even though the repair invoice is a fraction of the replacement.”— The NorthStar repair-or-replace promise
Furnaces, heat pumps and AC systems installed or serviced
Average system life extended by an annual maintenance plan
No-heat emergency line, answered right through the cold snap
Average homeowner rating across service and install calls
Sample figures shown for demonstration — replaced with your real numbers.
Recent work
Concept imagery — replaced with your project photographyA mid-efficiency furnace at the end of its life and a 2004 air conditioner nobody trusted, replaced with a single cold-climate heat pump and a right-sized gas backup. The Manual J showed the old unit was substantially oversized — which is exactly why the house short-cycled all winter and still felt drafty. Changeover completed in a day; we filed the rebate paperwork and the homeowner signed twice.
Concept imagery — replaced with your project photographyNo ductwork worth extending and a west-facing living room that became unusable every August. Two ductless heads on one inverter condenser: cooling and dehumidification through the summer, supplemental heat through the shoulder season, and quiet enough on low fan to sleep through. No soffits built, no ceilings opened.
Concept imagery — replaced with your project photographyThe complaint was “the back bedrooms never get warm.” The cause was total static pressure well over the equipment’s rated maximum and a return path strangled by one undersized grille. We sealed the trunk and branches, added a second return, rebalanced the registers and fitted a four-inch MERV 13 cabinet for wildfire smoke season. Same furnace — a different house to live in.
Sixty to ninety minutes with a technician who measures instead of guessing — and a written repair-or-replace recommendation you keep, whether you hire us or not.
Straight answers
Three things decide it: age against expected life, the repair cost against replacement cost, and whether the failure is a symptom of something worse — a cracked heat exchanger is a very different conversation than a failed igniter. As a rule of thumb, a large repair on a system past fifteen years rarely pays for itself. But we measure first and give you the recommendation in writing with the readings attached, so you can check our reasoning instead of trusting our mood.
For most homes here, yes. Cold-climate heat pumps hold useful capacity well below freezing, and our winters rarely sit down there for long. Where a house is leaky, under-insulated or has an unusually low balance point, we spec dual fuel — the heat pump carries the mild majority of the season, the gas furnace takes the cold snap. The load calculation tells us which of those two you are, before anyone spends money.
Provincial CleanBC and utility programs offer meaningful rebates for qualifying heat pump installations, and the amounts, eligibility rules and what can be stacked change from year to year. We will not quote you a figure we have not verified that week. Before you commit, we confirm the current program amounts for your address and your equipment, tell you what pre-approval requires, then file and track the paperwork through to the cheque.
An oversized furnace or air conditioner short-cycles: it blasts, satisfies the thermostat, shuts off, and never runs long enough to mix the air or pull humidity out of it. You get hot and cold rooms, noise, higher bills and shorter equipment life. A Manual J load calculation uses your real square footage, insulation, window area and orientation instead of a tonnage-per-square-foot rule of thumb someone learned in 1994.
Annual service on a furnace, seasonal on a heat pump: burners and heat exchanger inspected, flame sensor cleaned, blower wheel and coils cleaned, refrigerant charge and superheat verified, condensate line cleared, static pressure measured, filters changed and airflow re-checked. It keeps most manufacturer warranties valid, and it is a large part of the difference between a system that quits at twelve years and one that is still quiet at twenty.