What we work on

Mountain homes in this region run a wider mix of heating equipment than most places, often more than one type in the same house. We service and install all of it:

  • Heat pumps — by far the most common system up here, and the one most affected by elevation. See our heat pump repair and installation page for the detail.
  • Gas and propane furnaces — including the propane systems common where natural gas lines never reached.
  • Electric furnaces and air handlers with strip heat — including diagnosing why the strips are running when they should not be.
  • Dual-fuel systems — a heat pump paired with a furnace, where the changeover point has to be set correctly or you pay for it every month.
  • Ductless heating — see ductless mini-splits.

Signs your heating needs attention

Most heating failures announce themselves first. The ones worth calling about:

  • The system runs constantly and still never reaches the thermostat setting.
  • Auxiliary or emergency heat stays on for days in ordinary cold — usually a symptom, and an expensive one.
  • Some rooms are comfortable and others never get there.
  • A power or propane bill that jumped with no change in the weather.
  • Grinding, squealing, booming or rattling that was not there last season.
  • A breaker that trips when the heat comes on.
  • Ice on the outdoor unit that does not clear within a few hours.
  • Any burning or electrical smell that does not clear within ten minutes.

How a repair visit actually goes

  1. We diagnose before we quote. Gauges, meters and a look at the whole system — not a guess from the driveway.
  2. You get the findings in plain language, with the options and what each one costs, before anyone picks up a tool.
  3. We do the work and show you what was wrong, including the failed part where there is one.
  4. We tell you what we saw coming. If something else is close to the end of its life, you will hear about it now rather than in February.

Repair or replace?

This is the question most people are actually asking, and the honest answer depends on four things: the age of the equipment, the cost of the repair against the cost of replacement, how efficient the current system is, and whether it has been reliable up to now. A fifteen-year-old system facing a major repair is usually telling you something. An eight-year-old one with a failed capacitor is not.

We will tell you when a repair buys you another five good years, because we would rather earn the replacement later than sell it today. When replacement genuinely is the right call, our HVAC system replacement page covers what that process looks like.

Why mountain heating is its own problem

Elevation changes the math. A heat pump sized for a house at 2,100 feet in Hendersonville behaves differently at 2,300 feet in Black Mountain, and cold air draining into the coves overnight means a house in a hollow can read ten degrees colder at dawn than one on the ridge a mile away. Equipment has to be specified for where your house actually sits — not for the regional average.

Our guide on getting a heat pump ready for a mountain winter goes through what to check yourself before the first hard freeze.