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A portfolio of surprises becomes a budget once somebody writes it down
One survey document per building, one summary across the sites, and ages taken off serial numbers rather than from memory. It is unglamorous work and it is the reason most of our commercial clients stay.
Small commercial across Solano County
Offices and professional suites
Two to twenty rooms, usually a rooftop packaged unit or two, often with zoning that somebody reconfigured years ago and nobody documented. Service schedules, filter programmes and a written record per unit.
Clinics and treatment rooms
Rooms that must hold a temperature while somebody lies still in them, where draught and noise at the chair matter as much as the average thermostat reading, and where a failure cancels a day of appointments.
Retail units
Door-open trading, west-facing glass, and one packaged unit expected to cope with both. Honest conversations about air curtains and vestibules, including when they are not worth the money.
Workshops and light industrial
Units with tall doors, high bays and a process that makes heat. Destratification, spot heating and extraction, sized for how the space is actually worked rather than for its floor area.
Storage and warehousing
Where the requirement is temperature stability and dry air rather than comfort, and where the doors dominate the calculation more than the insulation does.
Landlords and managers
Attend, diagnose, photograph, price, report, and authorise nothing without your written say-so. Annual condition surveys per unit across a portfolio.
What a portfolio survey actually contains
The point of it is that a budget conversation stops being an argument about opinions.
- An inventory per building
- Every unit found and listed, with make, model, serial number, the manufacture date read off the serial, what it serves, its filter size, and the location of its isolator and condensate run. Photographs of every rating plate.
- A measured condition per unit
- Static pressure, airflow, charge against the manufacturer’s target, temperature split, amp draw, and combustion where there is gas. Dated, with the outdoor conditions recorded, so next year’s figures mean something.
- A replacement horizon, stated as a range
- Not a date. A range with a reason attached — the refrigerant it holds, the condition of the coil, the availability of parts, the measured performance. Anybody who gives you a single year for a machine that is currently working is inventing it.
- What we would do first, and what can wait
- Ordered by consequence rather than by price. Safety items first, then things that will fail and stop a business, then things that cost you money quietly, then things that are merely untidy.
Who pays for the rooftop unit
For tenants
If you are being asked to pay for a unit that was at the end of its life when you took the space, a dated condition report with photographs is worth a great deal more than a telephone conversation. We will say plainly whether a failure looks like wear, like age, or like something that was never installed correctly.
For landlords
An annual survey per unit means that when a tenant says a unit is finished, you have last year’s readings to set against it. It also means a dilapidations conversation starts from a document.
What we will not do
We will not write that a unit is beyond repair because that conclusion suits whoever is paying the invoice. If it can be repaired, the report says so and prices it. We also do not read leases — that is not our trade and we will say so.
Out of hours
Where a trading schedule requires it, service is done outside opening hours by arrangement. Tell us your hours when you call and we will say plainly what we can and cannot fit.