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- Serving Ames, IA & Surrounding Communities
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Commercial SERVICES
We provide design-build mechanical work, rooftop unit replacement, and planned maintenance for buildings that cannot afford to be uncomfortable, including research labs, schools, corporate offices, restaurants, and ag facilities. Our project types include both design-build and plan-spec work, and we serve all of central Iowa. Maintenance is available on a contract or per-visit basis, and our in-house PM team handles estimating.
Our commercial division has been doing mechanical work around Story County for decades, on projects where the specification actually matters — pressure relationships in a research lab, occupancy-driven ventilation in a school, kitchen make-up air in a restaurant, and rooftop units that have to survive an Iowa winter on top of a flat roof. We work both ways: design-build, where we engineer the system alongside your architect and general contractor, and plan-and-spec, where we bid and build to someone else’s drawings. Either way the estimating and project management stay in-house in Ames rather than routing through a regional office.
Mechanical systems for research and office tenants, where ventilation rates, filtration and temperature stability are not negotiable and the building has to accommodate tenants who change what they do in a space every few years.
School HVAC carries a specific set of constraints: occupancy swings from empty to packed within minutes, ventilation drives indoor air quality for children, sound levels have to stay low enough to teach in, and the bulk of the work has to happen inside a summer window.
Agricultural research space with controlled-environment requirements — the kind of project where the mechanical system is part of the experiment rather than a background utility.
Office HVAC for a builder that knows exactly what good mechanical work looks like, which is a useful kind of client to have.
Schools and education · Churches · Restaurants and commercial kitchens · Medical and dental offices · Agricultural and research facilities · Light industrial · Office and retail · Multi-family and apartment buildings · Municipal
A rooftop unit that fails during business hours costs far more than the repair. It costs the day. Commercial maintenance agreements put your equipment on a schedule keyed to its actual duty cycle — filters, belts, coils, refrigerant charge, control calibration and combustion checks — with a written condition report after each visit. Contract customers get priority dispatch when something does go down, and a documented equipment history that makes capital planning a budgeting exercise instead of a guess.
Have Questions?
Both. On design-build we work with the owner, architect and general contractor from the schematic stage, size and lay out the system, and carry it through commissioning. On plan-and-spec we bid and install to the engineer’s drawings. Design-build tends to produce a better result when the budget is tight, because we can make value decisions while the design is still fluid instead of after it is fixed.
A straight like-for-like RTU swap on an existing curb is typically a one-day crane-and-set operation. If the new unit needs a curb adapter, upsized electrical, new gas piping or ductwork transitions, plan on two to four days. We schedule crane time and shutdowns around your operating hours wherever the building allows it.
Yes, and for restaurants, medical offices and retail we usually have to. Nights, early mornings, weekends and school summer breaks are normal scheduling for us. Tell us your constraint when you request the quote so it is priced into the job rather than discovered halfway through.
Yes. We take on existing buildings regularly, including ones where the original contractor is long gone. A first visit on unfamiliar equipment usually includes an inventory and condition assessment so we both know what we are dealing with before committing to a maintenance schedule.
Our residential service radius is Ames and Story County, but commercial work takes us across central Iowa — Boone, Nevada, Story City, Marshalltown, Ankeny and the Des Moines metro included. Distance is a scheduling question rather than a barrier.
They can, and in central Iowa the economics are often better on a commercial building than a house because the loop field costs get spread across a larger load and the building runs closer to constant occupancy. Schools and offices with land available are particularly good candidates. Our geothermal page covers how the systems work.
Don’t wait for your comfort to freeze over. Get a professional, NATE-certified Converse technician dispatched to your home or business today.
