What an HVAC feed looks like when the whole city is brick

A cold upper floor in a brick house is usually not the furnace's fault

The most common comfort complaint in this housing stock has a cause most owners never suspect, and explaining it is the most useful video an HVAC company here can make.

Solid masonry walls with no cavity, tall single pane windows, a third floor that used to be an attic, and a distribution system sized for a house that has since been cut up. The furnace is usually fine.

Film the diagnosis rather than the fix. A reading at the register and another at the return, a hand on an exterior wall in January, a look at what a previous owner did to the duct in the basement.

Owners in Soulard, Tower Grove and Dogtown have all been told by somebody to buy a bigger furnace. Explaining why that tends to make the problem worse is the most credible thing you can say to them.

Steam and hot water systems get the same treatment. A radiator that stays cold on the top floor is a venting or a balance question far more often than it is a boiler question, and almost nobody has said that to the owner out loud.

The chimney was built for a coal furnace and nobody has looked since

Venting is the part of an old brick house that gets skipped in every conversation, and freeze-thaw has been working on it the whole time.

Chimneys in the older parts of the City and the inner county were built for a coal furnace and later handed a gas appliance, sometimes with a liner and sometimes without. Owners have no idea which they have.

Show what is up there. A camera down the flue, spalled brick behind the crown, a liner that stops short, a tile that has dropped. Homeowners find it fascinating and slightly alarming, which is the correct reaction.

Connect it to the rest of the house. Freeze-thaw works on masonry from the outside, water finds the flue, and a changeout to a high efficiency unit changes what the old chimney is being asked to carry.

Say what that means for a quote. An owner who learned from a video that a changeout can arrive with a liner does not treat it as a surprise charge when your estimator raises it.

Your brick videos cross the river even when your trucks will not

The Metro East is minutes away and sits in another state, and the housing content that works best here is exactly the content most likely to be watched over there.

Belleville, Edwardsville and the towns around them have the same solid walls, the same freeze-thaw winters and the same cold top floor. A video about a brick house finds those homeowners without you aiming it at them, because the subject travels even though your service area does not.

Settle the river the way a dispatcher would, before the audience builds itself. A bridge on a January night is a different drive from a run out to Florissant, and working on the Illinois side runs under another state's rules, which is worth confirming for your own shop rather than assuming.

If you do cross it, film there and say the town out loud. A Belleville basement in your feed does more on that side of the river than any amount of service area language, because footage shot in the county will not persuade an Illinois homeowner that your truck actually shows up on a Sunday.

If you do not cross it, put the boundary where people read rather than leaving it for the phone. Pin the answer, and keep a rough sense of how often the question arrives, because a steady run of Illinois messages is useful information about a market you have not decided on yet.

An occupancy inspection puts a furnace on somebody's closing date

Municipalities across St. Louis County inspect a house before somebody moves into it, which hands you an audience with a hard deadline and no appetite for shopping around.

The inspection turns up things a buyer or a seller has to settle before a date already written into a contract. A furnace at the end of its life, a flue nobody lined, a missing shutoff, a return that was never legal.

Practice varies from one municipality to the next, and part of what you are selling is knowing which office you are dealing with before the truck leaves. A house in Kirkwood is not looked at the same way as one in Florissant or University City.

The people to reach are the agents. An agent with a closing in three weeks needs somebody who answers the phone, and a short piece explaining what a flagged heating item usually means, and roughly how long each version takes, is aimed straight at them.

Keep the timeline honest. Say what you can turn around and what you cannot, because a promise made to an agent gets repeated to a buyer and then to a lender, and you will hear about it if it slips.

We keep the advice that applies to any HVAC company, wherever it works, on a single page.