Heating Maintenance & Tune-Ups

What the efficiency numbers actually mean

Furnaces are rated by AFUE, which is simply the percentage of fuel that becomes heat inside your house rather than going out the flue. A standard furnace runs around 80% AFUE. A condensing furnace, which pulls a second round of heat out of the exhaust before venting it, runs 90% or higher. Heat pumps get measured twice, SEER2 for cooling and HSPF2 for heating, and the federal minimum for a new split-system heat pump is 14.3 SEER2 and 7.5 HSPF2.

San Diego winters sit in the range where heat pumps are at their most efficient, so the cold-weather objection you may have read about does not apply here the way it does in colder states. If you are replacing both a furnace and an aging air conditioner, a single heat pump is worth pricing against two separate systems, because one piece of equipment then covers both jobs and SDG&E rebates on qualifying heat pumps are among the better utility incentives still running in 2026.

The equipment we install and service

We install and service Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Rheem, Goodman, York, American Standard and Bryant systems, and for ductless and heat pump work we install Mitsubishi Electric, Daikin, LG and Bosch. Carrying multiple lines matters more than it sounds, because it means the recommendation you get is based on what fits your house and your budget rather than on the one brand a company is locked into.

It matters for repairs too. Our trucks stock the parts that actually fail on these systems, which are usually capacitors, contactors, blower motors, ignitors and flame sensors, so most repair calls finish the same day rather than turning into a parts-ordering exercise. One thing worth knowing if your system is more than about fifteen years old: the industry has moved off R-410A refrigerant to lower-emission blends such as R-454B. Older R-22 systems are the ones where a refrigerant leak turns into a replacement conversation, because that refrigerant is no longer produced. We will tell you which side of that line your system sits on before you spend money on it.

How we actually find the fault

A diagnosis is not a guess delivered in a confident voice. On a cooling call we put gauges on the system and measure superheat and subcooling, which together tell us whether the refrigerant charge is correct and whether the metering device is doing its job. We measure the temperature differential between the air entering your return and the air leaving your supply, because a healthy system moves that number about 16 to 22 degrees. We check static pressure, the resistance the blower is fighting, which catches the duct and filter problems that get misdiagnosed as equipment failures every day.

On a heating call we use a combustion analyzer to read what is actually coming out of the flue, and we inspect the heat exchanger, because a cracked heat exchanger is a carbon monoxide risk and is the one finding where we will tell you to shut the system down rather than patch it. Measuring properly is what separates replacing the part that failed from replacing the part that looked suspicious.