How This Works

The data plate on the outdoor unit and the data plate on the furnace or air handler. Model number, serial number, capacity. Add the thermostat, the filter with its size showing, and whatever is misbehaving — ice on a line, water in a pan, a burner that will not stay lit.

Two things not to do for the sake of a picture: do not go up on a roof to reach a package unit, and do not take a panel off anything with gas or line voltage behind it. What is visible from standing on the ground and from an open closet door is enough.

What comes back is written: the age and capacity from the plates, the likely fault in order of probability, whether a repair makes sense at that age, the ranges for both paths, and the code items a replacement would carry — the mechanical permit, the Title 24 duct verification, the rebate sequence if a heat pump is in play. Where the answer needs gauges — a suspected leak, an intermittent electrical fault — it says so instead of inventing a number.

Nothing is scheduled and nothing is charged because you sent pictures. If the range works, the next step is a firm price from somebody with instruments on the system. If it does not, you are holding a second opinion in writing, which is the cheapest thing in this trade and the hardest to get in July.

Not a dispatch board and not a lead list: what you send is read and answered, not sold on. Not an inspection either — a photograph dates a system and reads a plate, it does not measure a charge or a static pressure, and this site is careful about which of those it is claiming.

Gas smell, a sounding CO alarm, soot around a furnace, or scorching in a cabinet: that answer comes first and it is not about money. Leave the house for the first two and call from outside.

A number we can reach you on. Almost every written read has a single follow-up question in it, and clearing that up by text takes a minute where another round of pictures takes a day.