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- Serving Ames, IA & Surrounding Communities
- Mon - Fri: 8:00 AM - 4:30 PM | 24/7 Emergency
RESIDENTIAL SERVICES
We handle everything a house needs to stay warm in February and cool in July: repair on any brand, replacement priced honestly, and the ductwork and air quality work most contractors would rather skip. You can typically expect a response the same or next day, and we repair all makes and models. Replacement quotes are free and provided in writing, and we offer emergency service on nights and weekends.
Ames housing runs the full range — 1920s bungalows near campus with one supply register per room, 1970s ranches on the south side, and new construction out toward Gilbert and Huxley with tight envelopes and undersized returns. The right answer is different in each, and a system sized off a rule of thumb rather than a load calculation is how people end up with a furnace that short-cycles for twenty years.
What we do
Furnaces that run but blow cold, ignitors that fail on the first cold night, AC units that freeze over, blower motors, capacitors, control boards, thermostats that lost their mind. We diagnose it, tell you the price, and fix it. If the honest answer is that the repair does not make sense on a 22-year-old unit, we will tell you that too.
What we do
New gas furnaces, air conditioners, cold-climate heat pumps, ductless mini-splits and geothermal. Every replacement quote starts with a Manual J load calculation rather than matching the tonnage on the old nameplate, because the old one was often wrong and your windows and insulation have probably changed since.
What we do
Additions, finished basements, kitchen remodels, and the upstairs bedroom that has never been comfortable. We fabricate and install sheet metal, add returns where a house is starved for them, and rebalance systems that were never commissioned properly.
What we do
A furnace check in the fall and an AC check in the spring. Not a sales visit — a clean, a full set of readings, and a written note about anything that is trending toward failure so you can plan for it instead of being surprised by it at 11pm in January.
A rough rule that has held up well in Iowa: multiply the repair cost by the age of the equipment. If the result clears $5,000, replacement usually wins. A $400 repair on a 9-year-old furnace is worth doing. The same repair on a 19-year-old furnace usually is not.
Add to that: R-22 systems are no longer economically repairable, and any furnace with a cracked heat exchanger gets condemned regardless of age.
Roughly six in ten housing units in Ames are renter-occupied, which means a large share of the furnaces in this town belong to someone who does not live in front of them. That is a different job than a single homeowner call, and we treat it that way. We handle single-family rentals, duplexes and multi-unit buildings: standardised equipment across a portfolio so your maintenance stock is predictable, scheduled turnover checks between tenants, direct tenant scheduling so you are not the switchboard, and consolidated invoicing by property.
Have Questions?
A well-maintained gas furnace in central Iowa typically runs 15 to 20 years. Air conditioners tend to go 12 to 17 years, and heat pumps land closer to 12 to 15 because they run in both seasons. Systems that never got annual service usually come in at the low end of those ranges.
A standard one-inch filter should be changed every one to three months. If you have pets, run the fan continuously, or live on a gravel road outside town, check it monthly. Four- and five-inch media filters generally last six to twelve months. A clogged filter is the single most common cause of the service calls we get for weak airflow and frozen AC coils.
Usually a return air problem rather than a supply problem. Warm air stacks upward, and most two-story homes in Ames were built with returns only on the main floor, so the upstairs has no easy path to pull air back to the furnace. Adding a second-floor return, adjusting dampers, or putting a ductless head in the worst room are the three fixes, in ascending order of cost.
We do not. Manufacturer warranties on residential equipment are tied to purchase and installation through an authorised dealer, so owner-supplied equipment usually arrives with no valid parts warranty and no factory support if something is wrong out of the box. We would rather quote you the whole job and stand behind all of it.
It is the industry-standard calculation of how much heating and cooling your specific house needs, based on square footage, insulation, window area and orientation, air sealing and local design temperatures. Oversized equipment short-cycles, which means noisy operation, poor dehumidification in summer, uneven temperatures and shorter equipment life. Sizing off the old unit’s nameplate repeats whatever mistake was made last time.
Yes. Ductless mini-splits are made for exactly that situation, and Ames has a lot of older homes and converted rentals where running duct is impractical. As a Mitsubishi Electric dealer we install single-zone and multi-zone systems that both heat and cool. See our cooling page for details.
Don’t wait for your comfort to freeze over. Get a professional, NATE-certified Converse technician dispatched to your home or business today.
