Westminster HVAC: Heating & Cooling Services

How we approach a Westminster home

Westminster sits at about 5,300 feet, with cold, dry winters and hot, sunny summer afternoons. That combination is hard on equipment that was sized by rule of thumb. A furnace that is too big short-cycles and leaves rooms uneven. An air conditioner that is too big cools the thermostat's room fast and leaves the upstairs warm. Gas appliances also lose some capacity at altitude, so a nameplate rating from a sea-level spec sheet doesn't tell the whole story.

So we start with numbers. A Manual J load calculation tells us how much heating and cooling your home actually needs, room by room, based on its insulation, windows, orientation and air leakage. A static pressure test tells us whether your ductwork can move the air a new system needs. Airflow readings at the registers show which rooms are starving. With that in hand, we can tell you whether the problem is the equipment, the ductwork or both.

In many Westminster homes, the ductwork is the bigger issue. Houses from the 1970s and 80s were often built with one central return and ducts sized for heating only. When central air was added later, the same ducts were asked to carry more air than they were built for. Adding a return to the upper floor, resizing a few supply runs and sealing leaky joints often fixes comfort complaints that a new unit alone would not.

When replacement does make sense, we size the new furnace, air conditioner or heat pump from the load calculation, pull the permit through the City of Westminster, and set the system up to the manufacturer's specifications. If a heat pump is a good fit, we'll explain how it performs in Colorado winters and whether a dual-fuel setup with a gas furnace backup makes sense for your home, and we handle the Xcel Energy and Colorado rebate paperwork.

Westminster neighborhoods we serve

Westminster's housing runs from 1960s and 70s homes in the south to golf-course and newer neighborhoods up north. The HVAC problems follow the age of the house, so here is what we usually find, neighborhood by neighborhood.

• Legacy Ridge: 1990s two-story homes around the golf course, where the upstairs often runs several degrees warmer than the main floor because of long, undersized supply runs.
• Standley Lake area: 1970s and 80s homes, many now on their second or third furnace, with original ductwork that leaks or was never balanced.
• Countryside: split-levels and tri-levels from the 1970s and 80s, where a single return leaves the top level hot in summer and the lower level cold in winter.
• Sheridan Green: established 1970s homes where central AC was added later, often with an air conditioner sized for the house but ducts sized only for heat.
• The Ranch: larger 1980s and 90s homes with finished basements and multiple floors, which benefit most from zoning, added returns and properly sized equipment.

Wherever you are in Westminster, we start with measurements: a load calculation, static pressure and airflow at the registers. That tells us whether the fix is equipment, ductwork or both, before you spend money on either.