- 60 Hartsdale Rd, Rochester NY 14622
- 7am to 7pm · 7 days a week
- Call an owner: 585 454 8422
A real tune-up finds the parts about to fail and cleans what has gone dirty. What it should never include is quietly adding refrigerant every spring. Your AC does not use refrigerant. If it is low, something is leaking, and topping it up year after year is paying repeatedly for gas that ends up in the air.
No heat in winter, no cool in a heat wave, busted lines. We answer the phone day or night, weekends included.
This is the thing worth knowing before anyone services your AC. An air conditioner is a sealed loop. The refrigerant is not burned or used up, it just circulates. The charge it left the factory with should still be in there a decade later. It is not like oil in an engine and it is not like fuel in a tank.
So if a system is low, refrigerant has escaped through a hole somewhere. Anyone topping it up each spring without hunting for the leak is describing a fault they have chosen not to find. Meanwhile a low charge starves the compressor of the oil that travels with the refrigerant, and moisture creeping in through the same hole turns acidic inside the system. That is how a small leak eventually costs you the most expensive part in the unit. We measure the charge, and if it is down we go looking for why.
Justin VanCassele and Colby Baker run AmeriHeat together. Colby is a veteran. Both owners are on jobs every week across Rochester and Monroe, Wayne and Ontario Counties.
Give them a call. They actually pick up.
Not a glance and a sticker. Here is what we actually go through on a Canandaigua system.
Both of them. A dirty condenser outside cannot dump heat, and a dirty evaporator inside cannot absorb it. This is the single biggest reason a system runs long and still falls short of what it is rated to do.
Measure, not top up. We check it against what the system should be holding. If it reads low we tell you there is a leak and talk about finding it, rather than adding a pound and coming back next year.
This is the part that most often strands people in July. It weakens gradually and can be measured before it fails outright. Catching a weak one in spring is the difference between a booked visit and an emergency call.
In a humid Finger Lakes summer your system pulls a lot of water out of the air, and all of it goes down that line. A blocked drain backs up into the house or trips the float switch and shuts you down on the hottest day.
We tighten connections and look at the contactor, which is a wear part that pits and eventually sticks. Loose or burnt terminals cause intermittent faults that are miserable to diagnose once the season is in full swing.
We confirm air is actually moving the way it should and look at the blower. Poor airflow makes everything else worse, from comfort to the coil freezing over on a humid day.
Cooling is only half the job here. We look at run times and how the system is actually behaving, because a house can hit the set temperature and still feel damp if it is short cycling.
We run it, check the temperature split across the coil, confirm the controls cut in and out properly, and then give you a straight account of what we found and what, if anything, it needs.
Summers here come with real humidity, and your air conditioner is doing two jobs at once, dropping the temperature and pulling moisture out of the air. When a system is oversized or the airflow is wrong, it satisfies the thermostat quickly and shuts off before it has removed much water. The house reads seventy two and still feels clammy, and people respond by turning it down further, which makes it worse. A tune-up that looks at run behaviour rather than just temperature catches that.
Why a leak shows up in August rather than May. A system losing charge slowly still cools acceptably in mild weather. It is only when the heat really arrives and the equipment is asked for everything it has that the shortfall becomes obvious. That is why so many people discover the problem on the worst possible week, and why a spring check is worth more than a summer one.
If your unit is more than about ten years old it may run on R-22, which has been phased out and is now expensive. On one of those, the combination of a leak search, the repair itself, and a recharge can approach what a new system costs. That is not a sales line, it is arithmetic, and it can go either way depending on the unit. We will lay out both numbers honestly and let you decide instead of steering you toward the bigger job.
Same two people either way, across Canandaigua and Ontario County.
If the musty smell comes with the AC running, that is growth on the wet coil. A UV-C lamp is the fix for that specific problem.
UV AIR PURIFIER →For the room the central system never reaches, or a house with no ductwork at all. Heating and cooling in one.
DUCTLESS INSTALLATION →Heating, cooling, and air quality for Canandaigua NY, all from the owners. See everything we do in your area.
CANANDAIGUA HVAC →More AmeriHeat services in Canandaigua
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Call, email, or send the form. Justin or Colby answers the phone, not a call center. We will get your Canandaigua AC system diagnosed and back to running right.
