Getting equipment running right — and keeping it that way — through start-up, balancing, commissioning, and maintenance.
What We Provide
Start-up, testing and balancing, commissioning support, and planned maintenance — here is what our service work covers once the equipment is set.
Planned Maintenance
A maintenance agreement is only worth what the technician actually does on the roof. Our planned-maintenance scope follows the same discipline as our start-ups — readings recorded, not just boxes checked — and tracks the inspection and maintenance tasks laid out in ASHRAE/ACCA Standard 180, the industry standard for commercial HVAC maintenance.
Built for Tucson
Tucson is one of the hardest climates in the country on cooling equipment. Summer design temperatures push past 105°F, and on a dark roof the air a condenser actually breathes runs hotter still. From May through September, rooftop units operate at or near their limits for hours every day — which means the margin for neglect is close to zero. A slightly low refrigerant charge or a half-fouled condenser coil that would go unnoticed for years in a mild climate becomes a tripped compressor here during the first sustained heat wave.
Then the monsoon arrives. Dust storms drive fine desert grit into condenser coils, economizer intakes, and filter banks in a single afternoon, and the humidity that follows puts condensate systems — idle for nine dry months — suddenly to work. Coil-cleaning and filter cycles in Pima County simply have to run shorter than the national norms, and July and August are when the units that skipped their spring service go down.
That is why the spring tune-up matters more here than anywhere else on the calendar. Finding a weak capacitor, a worn contactor, or a marginal charge in March costs a scheduled visit; finding it during the first 108°F week of June costs tenant comfort, product, or lost business — and it happens to every building in town the same week, when every service company is buried. A fall visit then covers the heating checks and the economizer season, when desert nights are cool enough for free cooling if the dampers actually work.
For facilities that want one contractor across trades, we schedule HVAC maintenance alongside commercial electrical maintenance — panel checks, exit-light testing, and rooftop service handled by one crew, on one visit, with one report.
Where It Applies
We run service, start-up, and balancing out of Tucson for office buildings, retail centers, and industrial facilities.
The Design-Build Advantage
Start-up goes faster when the techs aren't decoding someone else's installation. On our design-build jobs, the crew that commissions the system comes from the same shop that engineered and installed it — and stands behind both.
Back to HVACRepair or Replace
Every aging RTU eventually forces the question, and the honest answer comes from three things: the unit's age, its refrigerant, and its repair history. Commercial rooftop units are commonly rated for a 15–20 year service life, and Tucson rooftops sit at the short end of that range — the run hours and heat here age equipment faster than the national average. Refrigerant matters more every year: R-410A is now in a federal phasedown under the AIM Act as the industry moves to lower-GWP refrigerants, so servicing older circuits gets progressively more expensive. And efficiency compounds the math — current-generation units meet substantially higher federal efficiency minimums than equipment from a decade ago, and at Tucson run hours that delta shows up on every TEP bill.
FAQ
Curious how the work itself is done? Our field guides cover wiring a rooftop unit and running thermostat and BAS control wiring.
Quarterly is the working baseline for most commercial buildings here, with the spring visit treated as the one that cannot slip — it is the last chance to catch weak components before the cooling season leans on them. During monsoon season, filter changes and condenser-coil checks often need to run tighter than the quarterly cycle, because a single dust storm can load a coil in an afternoon. We set the actual frequency by the site: run hours, dust exposure, equipment age, and how critical cooling is to the operation.
Yes. We build planned-maintenance agreements around the facility rather than a template — an equipment inventory sets the scope, visit frequency follows the site's run hours and dust load, and every visit produces a written report with readings, not just initials on a checklist. Agreements can fold in filters, belts, and coil cleaning, and can be scheduled alongside our electrical maintenance so one crew covers the building in one trip.
A proper start-up report records the unit's nameplate data, supply voltage and amp draws for each compressor and motor, refrigerant pressures with superheat and subcooling, temperature split across the coil, fan rotation, economizer operation, and verification of the safeties and control sequence. It is effectively the unit's birth certificate — the baseline every future reading gets compared against — and most manufacturers expect documented start-up to keep the warranty intact.
We run scheduled daytime service, not a 24/7 emergency dispatch. Our crews are in the field Monday through Thursday from 6 AM to 3 PM and Friday from 6 AM to 2 PM, and a down unit goes to the front of that schedule — typically the same or next business day. The honest fix for after-hours risk is prevention: equipment that is maintained on a real schedule, with baseline readings watched over time, very rarely fails without warning first.
It depends on the drivers: how many units and their tonnage, roof access, equipment age and run hours, the filter count and sizes, the condition of the coils at the start, and whether the scope is inspection-only or full preventive maintenance with filters, belts, and coil cleaning included. Rather than quote a building blind, we walk the roof, inventory the equipment, and price the actual scope — request a bid and we will schedule the survey.
A minor failure on a unit around a decade old or newer — a capacitor, contactor, motor, or belt — is almost always a repair. A compressor or heat-exchanger failure on a unit past fifteen years, out of warranty, usually is not: between the refrigerant phasedown, the efficiency gap against current equipment, and the repairs that follow the first big one, replacement tends to win the math. We service both sides of that line — we will quote the repair honestly and tell you when we would stop putting money into the unit.
Yes — most maintenance portfolios come to us that way. The first visit establishes the baseline: we document nameplate data for every unit, record voltages, amp draws, and refrigerant readings, and flag anything already marginal in a condition report. From there the equipment goes onto a normal planned-maintenance schedule, and you have documentation of where everything stood on day one.
Tell us what's installed and what it's doing — or what's about to start up. We'll get a tech or a start-up crew on it.
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