Repair and diagnosis
Ignition, flame sensing, blowers, capacitors, contactors, control boards, refrigerant faults, drainage. Priced in writing before it starts.
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- Services
What RidgeLine actually does.
Two tracks — homes and commercial buildings — running through the same five kinds of work. Both get a real share of our week, and both are written out here in full.
Residential
Homes, condos and small apartment buildings.
Single-family houses across Pomona, Claremont, San Dimas and the valley either side. A lot of this stock has had two or three systems in it since it was built, and the interesting problems are usually at the joins between them.
What we get called for
- Furnace will not light, or lights and drops out
- Air conditioner running but not cooling
- Breaker tripping, or a unit short-cycling
- Ice on the line set or a flooded condensate pan
- One room that never gets its share of the air
- A thermostat nobody has managed to program
- Noise, smell or dust that started recently
- A system old enough that you want a second opinion
How a home visit runs
Shoe covers and drop cloths go down first. We work out what is wrong by measurement — static pressure, temperature split, refrigerant state, gas and electrical checks, combustion and venting — and photograph anything we are going to tell you about. Then you get a written price, and only then do we start.
If the honest answer is "this is fine, leave it alone", that is the answer you get, and you pay for the diagnostic rather than for a repair you did not need.
Replacement
Furnaces, air handlers, condensers, heat pumps and full changeouts. Sized on a load calculation, not on what the old label said.
Seasonal maintenance
Heating check before the first cold week, cooling check before the first hot one. The point is finding the fault while it is still a small one.
Ducts and airflow
Leak testing, sealing, replacing crushed or undersized flex, adding returns, balancing. Measured before and measured after.
Thermostats and zoning
Controls chosen because you will actually use them. We set them up with you and leave you able to change them yourself.
Filtration and ventilation
Filters sized to what the system can move, and outside air brought in deliberately rather than through whatever gaps the house has.
Commercial
Offices, retail, light industrial and multi-tenant buildings.
The commercial side is not a scaled-up version of the residential one. Access is negotiated, the work is scheduled around trading hours, and the paperwork has to survive being forwarded to an owner, a tenant or an insurer.
What we cover
- Packaged rooftop units — service, repair, economisers, curb adapters and full replacement with a crane day planned in advance.
- Split systems per tenancy — the usual arrangement in strip retail, where one failure is one tenant's whole trading day.
- Mechanical rooms — boilers and furnaces, combustion air, flue systems, pumps, and the controls nobody has documented.
- Ventilation and make-up air — kitchens, workshops and anywhere exhaust has been added without anyone asking where the replacement air comes from.
- Tenant improvements — moving, splitting or extending a system when a unit is re-partitioned.
- Planned maintenance contracts — a scheduled visit per unit, with a written record per unit.
An equipment register, kept current
On a maintenance agreement we build a list of every unit on the building: where it is, what it is, its age, its condition and what we did to it and when. It lives with the building, so when the managing agent changes, the history does not vanish with them.
Work that fits your trading hours
Early starts, evenings and weekends where the space has to stay open. Roof access, keys, alarm codes and escort arrangements are agreed before the van is loaded, not discovered at the gate.
What we do not claim
We do not quote energy-saving percentages, payback periods or efficiency gains for your building. Those numbers depend on the building, its hours, its occupancy and its utility rate, and anyone who offers them before seeing the site is guessing. If you want a figure, we will look first and then tell you what we actually measured.
Repair
Diagnosis before parts.
A part that fails rarely fails on its own. A capacitor that has gone twice in two summers is telling you something about the condenser it is sitting in; a flame sensor that keeps fouling is telling you something about combustion. We look for the reason, not just the symptom, and we say so when the reason is the expensive one.
You get the diagnostic findings, photographs, and a written price for the fix. Where a repair is genuinely borderline against replacement, you get both numbers and our reasoning — including the part we are least sure about.
Replacement
Sized on the building, not on the old label.
The single most common fault we find in a recently-replaced system is that it is too big. An oversized unit satisfies the thermostat quickly, shuts off, and never runs long enough to move air properly or take moisture out — so the building is cold and uncomfortable at the same time, and the equipment wears out cycling.
- Step one
- Load calculationWe measure the building — orientation, glazing, insulation, infiltration, occupancy and, for commercial, what the space is actually used for. The old equipment's capacity is evidence, not an answer.
- Step two
- Look at the distributionNew equipment fitted to bad ductwork gives you an expensive version of the same problem. We test the duct system before specifying, and tell you if it needs work first.
- Step three
- Options, in writingUsually two or three: what solves the problem, what solves it with more headroom, and what is merely adequate. Each with its trade-offs written down, including the ones that count against the more expensive choice.
- Step four
- Installation and commissioningPermits where the work requires them, venting and combustion air corrected as part of the job, and the system commissioned and measured rather than simply switched on.
- Afterwards
- DocumentationModel and serial numbers, commissioning readings, warranty registration and — for commercial — a record that slots into the building's equipment register.
Maintenance
The visit that stops the emergency.
For a house that is two visits a year: heating before the first cold week, cooling before the first hot one. For a building it is a schedule per unit, sized to how hard each unit works — a rooftop unit over a kitchen is not on the same interval as one over a quiet office.
What a visit covers: filters, coils, drains and pans, electrical connections and current draw, capacitors and contactors, refrigerant state, airflow, controls, and — on anything gas-fired — combustion and the full venting path.
What you get afterwards is a written record of the readings, so next year's numbers can be compared with this year's. That comparison is what turns "it seems fine" into "this compressor is drawing more than it did".
Air quality & controls
Filtration, ventilation and thermostats.
Filtration is a trade-off, not a rating to maximise. A filter far denser than the system was designed to pull through will starve the equipment and make everything else worse. We match the filter to what the blower can actually move, and if you want better filtration than that, we tell you what has to change first.
Ventilation is the other half. Buildings that have been tightened up — new windows, new weatherstripping, a re-roof — sometimes lose the accidental leakage they were relying on. Then the answer is to bring outside air in deliberately, where it can be filtered and conditioned, rather than through whatever gap is left.
Controls come last and matter more than people expect. A thermostat you cannot operate is a thermostat that gets left on hold at one temperature all year.
Ductwork
The half of the system nobody sells you.
Equipment gets replaced; ductwork usually does not. We find flex that has been crushed by storage, runs that were extended with tape and hope, returns that are a fraction of what the system needs, and joints that have been open since the day they were installed.
A leak on the supply side wastes the air you paid to condition. A leak on the return side is worse: it pulls in whatever is in the attic or the crawl space and delivers it into the rooms. In a commercial ceiling void it will happily pull air from a neighbouring tenancy.
We test, we seal, we fix what is undersized, and we measure again afterwards so the improvement is a number rather than an opinion.
Not sure which of these you need?
Describe the symptom and the building. That is enough for us to tell you what is likely, what it will take to confirm it, and what happens next.