Heat Pump Installation and Repair in Corte Madera, CA

What fails, and the first sign of it

Heat pumps rarely stop all at once. They degrade, and the early signals are easy to explain away. These are worth a call:

• Ice on the outdoor unit that does not clear after a defrost cycle, or rebuilds within minutes
• Auxiliary electric heat running for hours in weather that does not justify it
• Short cycling: starting and stopping every few minutes instead of running long and quiet
• Air arriving at the wrong temperature for the selected mode, which points at the reversing valve
• Water where it should not be, such as a stained ceiling below an attic unit or a wet closet
• The outdoor fan turning while the compressor stays silent, or a compressor that hums and stalls
• Utility usage climbing season over season with no change in how you use the house
• A new noise: a rattle at startup, a screech from a failing bearing, a grinding under the fan

Ductwork usually decides it

Once the rule and the equipment are settled, one thing decides more heat pump projects in this town than anything else, and it is not the heat pump. It is the duct system it has to breathe through.

A gas furnace delivers air hot and in short bursts. A heat pump delivers air much closer to room temperature, so it has to move considerably more of it to put the same heat into a house. Ducts that performed acceptably behind a furnace can be badly undersized behind a heat pump, and the failure does not announce itself with a code. It shows up as a house that never quite warms, a system running almost continuously, and rooms at the end of the longest run that stay cold. The measurement that catches it is external static pressure, read across the air handler with a manometer. A ducted proposal written without that reading is a guess with a price attached.

Much of Corte Madera is mid-century or older, and what we find under these houses varies widely: tight crawlspaces on the flats with undersized trunk lines, attic runs added decades after the original build, and small homes on Christmas Tree Hill with no continuous crawlspace to route through, where the original heat was never ducted. When ducts cannot be corrected at a sane cost, or do not exist, a multi-zone ductless system is not a consolation prize. It puts capacity in the rooms that need it and stops you paying to condition a crawlspace.

What drives the cost

You get a number before work starts, not on a web page, because the drivers are specific to your address.

Distribution is the largest variable: reusing sound ducts, sealing and selectively resizing them, replacing them, or going ductless are four different projects. Electrical is second, covering panel capacity, the run from panel to equipment, and whether a service upgrade or a load-management device is needed. Outdoor unit siting is third, and it counts for more here than in a flat subdivision. Hillside lots on Christmas Tree Hill are steep and narrow with short distances to a neighbor's wall, so placement and sound rating get chosen together, while flats lots usually offer a side yard and an easy set.

Condensate handling is its own line item and it is where corners get cut. A heat pump produces water in cooling mode and again during defrost, and where gravity cannot carry it to a legal termination the job needs a properly routed drain or a pump with a safety switch. Beyond that: zone count and control strategy, the modulating range of the equipment, moving an indoor unit out of a cramped closet, permit and inspection, decommissioning the old gas appliance and its flue, and anything we uncover such as suspect duct wrap or brittle branch wiring. Better to find those at the estimate than on install day, and so ours involves crawling around your house rather than standing in the driveway.

Rebates and incentives, current position

This moves often enough that a linked source matters more than a remembered figure.

MCE is the community choice energy provider in Corte Madera, meaning MCE supplies your generation while PG&E delivers the power and bills for it. Worth knowing what MCE does not cover if you plan to stack projects: MCE's EV charging program is aimed at workplaces, multifamily properties of four or more units, and commuter parking lots, so it will not fund a charger at a house. The charger money to ask about is PG&E's, whose terms make Community Choice Aggregation customers eligible, and MCE's own residential offer is MCE Sync, which rewards smart charging. County lines matter too. Sonoma Clean Power's water heating rebates serve Sonoma County customers and do not reach Marin, though they are often described online as North Bay programs.

Heat pump maintenance runs on a different schedule

A gas furnace sits idle for half the year. A heat pump does not, and that difference drives how it should be cared for. Two visits a year suit it, one before the cooling season and one before the heating season, since each mode loads different components and the defrost sequence can only be verified in cool weather.

Filters get asked about more than anything else, and the answer is usually not the most expensive product on the shelf. A very restrictive filter on a duct system that is already tight makes an airflow problem worse, so filter selection should follow the static pressure the system has. Beyond filters: keep the outdoor coil clear of leaf litter, and expect coils in marine-influenced air to need washing more often than an inland unit. The condensate line and pan get cleared before every cooling season. Refrigerant charge gets measured against the manufacturer's target rather than topped off, because a system low on refrigerant has a leak and adding more only resets the clock. Finally, the thermostat should be configured for heat pump staging with a sensible lockout on the auxiliary electric heat, since furnace logic quietly burns resistance heat all winter. Our maintenance plans carry that cadence.

Where we work in Corte Madera

We work the flats, Christmas Tree Hill, the Town Center area and the streets around them, and the two ends of town present different jobs. The flats sit low and level near the bay margin, where homes generally have crawlspaces, workable side yards and easy outdoor unit placement, and where we watch corrosion and condensate terminations closely. Christmas Tree Hill is the opposite: narrow, steep streets, older and smaller homes, limited staging room for a crew, no continuous crawlspace for ducts, and neighbors close enough that where the outdoor unit lands becomes a design decision.

Power is the other local factor. Through its Public Safety Power Shutoff program, PG&E may turn off power during severe weather to reduce wildfire risk, and hillside neighborhoods across Marin carry more of that exposure than valley streets. A heat pump is all-electric, so it stops when the power stops. A gas furnace is not the escape hatch people assume, because its blower, ignition and controls are electric too. If keeping the house conditioned through an outage matters, that is a backup power conversation, cheaper to have during design than after. We are a Certified Generac Generator installer. For the rest of the picture at your address, see HVAC in Corte Madera.

How to choose a heat pump contractor in Corte Madera

Five questions separate the bids faster than any credential list. Will the contractor perform a room-by-room load calculation and show it to you, rather than sizing from the old equipment's rating? Will static pressure be measured on the existing ducts before a ducted system is quoted? Who pulls the permit, and under whose license? The permit belongs under the contractor's own license, not yours. What refrigerant does the proposed equipment use, given that the answer shapes serviceability a decade out? And does one company perform both the mechanical and electrical work, or will you coordinate two trades?

We hold C-20 HVAC, C-10 electrical and C-36 plumbing classifications, so a conversion here does not become a scheduling problem between three contractors. We are Diamond Certified, hold a BBB A+ Rating, and have been a family business in this county since 1932.

What North Bay homeowners say

Two North Bay customers describing heat pump work our technicians performed:

Heat pump work across Corte Madera and Marin County

See every trade we run at your address on the Corte Madera service page, the county picture at heating and cooling in Marin County, or the neighboring town at heat pump service in Mill Valley.