Outside air
Verified at the unit rather than assumed from a damper position. Economizers checked for actual function, which is where a surprising number of them fail.
- Home
- Commercial
Light commercial & tenant improvement
Office and R&D suites, small retail, fit-outs and equipment rooms. Smaller than a mechanical contractor's minimum, larger than most residential outfits will take on — which is exactly the gap this work sits in.
Suites
Rooftop units on tilt-up buildings
Most of the office and R&D stock around East Middlefield and the Bayshore corridor is conditioned by packaged rooftop units, frequently one per suite, frequently installed by whoever fitted out the last tenant.
The recurring problems are consistent: units sized for a floor plan that no longer exists, economizers seized shut, schedules still set for a tenant who left in 2019, and returns that were re-routed around a partition wall nobody documented.
- Diagnostics
- Same instruments, larger equipmentStatic pressure, temperature split, refrigerant pressures, amp draws against nameplate, economizer function and damper position.
- Repairs
- Compressors, condenser fan motors, blower and belt work, boards and sensors, economizer actuators and linkages, curb and flashing work.
- Changeouts
- Crane, permit, curb adapterScheduled outside operating hours, with roof protection down, access arranged and the closed permit handed over.
- Asset record
- Every unit located, tagged and recorded — make, model, serial, age, refrigerant, filter and belt sizes. Plain format, yours to keep.
Fit-out
Tenant improvement
When a suite is reconfigured, the mechanical system almost never is. New partitions land across existing diffusers, a conference room appears where a corridor was, and a fully glazed corner office inherits a single register sized for a storage cupboard.
We work to the architect's drawings where there are drawings and to a measured survey where there are not, which in a building on its fourth tenant is most of the time.
- Duct modification, extension and relocation
- Diffuser and return layouts redrawn to the new plan
- Zoning and thermostat relocation
- Supplementary units for conference rooms and glazed corners
- Air balancing at handover, with a written report
- Coordination with the general contractor's programme
Critical space
Equipment, server and IDF rooms
A room full of running equipment has a load that does not care what season it is, what time it is, or whether the office next door is occupied. It needs cooling at three in the morning in January.
The common failure mode is a room served by the building's comfort system, which shuts down on schedule at seven in the evening. It works perfectly until the first evening somebody notices the room at 95°F.
- Dedicated cooling
- Independent of the building scheduleA ductless or small packaged system sized to the actual equipment load and running on its own controls, not the office thermostat.
- Redundancy
- Where downtime genuinely matters, two smaller units rather than one larger one, so a failure is a degradation rather than an outage.
- Alarms
- Somebody has to be toldHigh-temperature alarm contacts wired out to whatever monitoring already exists. A room that fails silently fails completely.
- Condensate
- Routed and pumped away from equipment, with an overflow safety. A cooling system that drips into a rack is worse than no cooling system.
Compliance
Ventilation that satisfies an inspector
In a commercial space, ventilation is not a comfort preference. It is a code requirement with a number attached, and at handover somebody will ask to see it demonstrated.
Exhaust
Restrooms, break rooms, copy and storage areas, and any process or laboratory extraction the space was built with.
Pressure
Exhaust without matched make-up air pulls conditioned air out of the suite and makes entry doors hard to open. Measured, not guessed at.
Air balancing
Measured at every diffuser and return, adjusted, and issued as a written balance report at handover.
Filtration
Deeper filter sections where the tenant wants better filtration, with the static pressure penalty measured rather than discovered later.
Documentation
Permit, Title 24 forms, balance report and closed inspection, handed over as one file for the building record.
Response
Being realistic about response times
What we do offer
- An arrival window on the phone, not a callback promise
- Work scheduled outside your operating hours where it is disruptive
- Purchase orders, cost codes and per-suite invoicing
- Certificates of insurance naming your entity
- Site inductions, badging and escorted access
- An asset list you keep, whoever services it next
What we do not claim
We are a small shop. We do not run a 24-hour dispatch desk, and saying we did would be a promise we could not keep at three in the morning in February.
If your operation genuinely cannot tolerate an overnight outage, the right answer is redundancy designed in — two units instead of one, alarms wired out — rather than a contractor's emergency number. We would rather build that with you than sell you a response time we cannot honour.
Walk the suite with us
A survey, an asset list and a written scope before anybody talks about price.