What Counts as an HVAC Emergency
What genuinely needs somebody out tonight, what can wait until morning, and what you should handle yourself before calling anyone.
By Derek Mills, Co-owner, service lead ·
After hours calls cost more, for us and for you. Some of them are absolutely worth it. Some of them could have waited until eight the next morning and saved you real money. Here is my honest sorting.
Call immediately, do not wait
You smell gas or oil. Leave the building first, then call. Gas company or fire department before you call us. Do not flip switches on your way out, do not use the phone inside.
A carbon monoxide alarm is sounding. Everyone outside, call 911. Do not go back in to investigate.
Smoke, burning smell, or anything scorched. Shut the system off at the breaker if you can do it safely, and call.
Water actively running from a boiler, a burst pipe, or a water heater. Shut the water off at the main, then call. Every minute of running water is more damage.
A relief valve fully discharging on a boiler or water heater. Shut the appliance down and call.
Breaker trips repeatedly. Reset once. If it goes again, leave it off and call. That is a fault and repeatedly resetting onto it is a fire risk.
Worth an after hours call
No heat, and it is genuinely cold out. This is the main legitimate one. Below freezing, especially well below, the clock on your plumbing is running. A house without heat in single digits can start freezing pipes within a day, and burst pipes cost far more than an after hours rate.
If it is 45 degrees out and your heat is down, that is usually a morning problem. Grab a blanket.
No heat and there is a vulnerable person in the house. Infants, elderly, anyone with a medical condition affected by cold. Do not tough it out to save a service fee.
No cooling in a serious heat wave with a vulnerable person in the house. Same reasoning. For a healthy adult on an 85 degree evening, cooling is a comfort problem, not a safety one, and it will keep until morning.
Commercial refrigeration or process cooling. If product is at risk, that is a different calculation entirely.
A commercial space that cannot operate. A restaurant that cannot serve or a retail space that has to close is losing more per hour than the call costs.
Wait until morning
- Heat or cooling out in mild weather
- One room uncomfortable while the rest of the house is fine
- A noise that is new but the system still works
- Higher bills than expected
- A thermostat behaving oddly but the system running
- Anything you noticed three weeks ago and are only now calling about
None of these get better overnight, and none of them get worse either.
Check these first, any hour
Before you call anyone, spend ten minutes. Genuinely a meaningful share of no heat calls are one of these:
- The service switch. Looks like a light switch, near the equipment or at the top of the basement stairs. People flip it by accident constantly.
- The breaker. All the way off, then back on. Once.
- The thermostat. Set to HEAT or COOL, setpoint pushed ten degrees past the room temperature, and fresh batteries.
- Fuel. Oil tank gauge, propane percentage. Do other gas appliances work.
- The filter. If it is grey and matted, replace it and see what happens.
- Outside vents, in winter. High efficiency equipment vents through PVC out the side of the house. Snow and ice block them and the appliance shuts down as a safety response. Very common after a storm, and a five minute fix.
- The reset button on an oil burner. Press it once. Not twice, not five times. Repeated resets pump raw oil into the chamber and create a genuine hazard.
If one of those solves it, you just saved yourself a few hundred dollars.
Making the call more useful
When you do call, have this ready:
- What kind of system, and roughly how old
- What is actually happening, as specifically as you can put it
- Any error code. Many furnaces flash a diagnostic code on a small LED behind the access panel, and if you read that to us we may show up with the part already on the truck.
- What you already checked from the list above
- Whether you have heat or cooling anywhere in the building
The more specific you are, the better the odds we fix it on the first trip.
Protecting the house while you wait
If you have no heat and it is cold, close off unused rooms, let a faucet drip on the fixture farthest from the water entry, and open cabinet doors under sinks on outside walls.
Space heaters plugged directly into a wall outlet, never an extension cord, three feet of clearance, never unattended, never overnight in a bedroom.
Never a gas oven or a grill for heat. Every winter somebody does that and it kills people.