When a homeowner calls for a replacement quote, the easy thing to do is walk the house, look at the old equipment, and quote the same tonnage. Most companies do exactly that. We don’t.
Equipment is sized to the load of the house, not the size of the box that used to be there. The old unit might have been oversized by 40% — common in homes built before tight envelopes and modern insulation. Drop in another oversized unit and you get short cycling, poor dehumidification, and a 12-year warranty that runs out two years early.
Manual J is a room-by-room heating and cooling load calculation. It considers your windows, your insulation, your air leakage, your duct location, your orientation to the sun. It tells us — in BTUs — what your house actually needs.
We do the calc before we quote. The equipment recommendation falls out of the math. You see the numbers. You see the equipment options that fit. You see why we’re recommending what we’re recommending.
It takes us a couple hours extra up front. It saves you ten years of paying for the wrong system.