Marin County, California
Home Services in Novato, CA
As north Marin's largest city, Novato sees warm inland summers that put cooling systems to work. Ongaro & Sons keeps Novato comfortable with expert air conditioning, heating, plumbing, and electrical service.
Ongaro & Sons runs home services in Novato from our Petaluma headquarters, one exit down Highway 101, under a California contractor license carrying C-20 HVAC, C-36 plumbing and C-10 electrical classifications, and we have worked in Marin since the company was founded here in 1932. We hold 2,745 Google reviews averaging 4.8 stars. Novato is the Marin city where almost nothing is run by the city: your water comes from one special district, your sewer from another, and only the permit comes from City Hall.
We are Diamond Certified and hold a BBB A+ Rating. We are a Trane Comfort Specialist, a Mitsubishi Diamond Contractor Elite and a Certified Generac Generator installer. We quote flat rate, by the job rather than by the hour, before work starts.
On this page
Why does this work look different in Novato than in the rest of Marin?
Two reasons, and they compound.
The first is position. Novato sits at the inland north end of the county, away from the ridges that pull the marine layer over the coastal towns. It is one of Marin's warmer places, and it carries genuine cooling demand that Sausalito and Bolinas never develop. A contractor who learned the trade in southern Marin will size equipment for a climate this town does not have.
The second is that the city is not the utility. Water is North Marin Water District. Sewer is Novato Sanitary District, a separate agency with its own board, its own rules and, unusually, its own money on the table for lateral replacement. Electricity generation is MCE, delivery is PG&E. The City of Novato Building Division issues the building permit inside city limits, and the Marin County Community Development Agency does it for unincorporated parcels. That is five organizations touching an ordinary electrification project, and knowing which one owns which decision is most of what keeps a schedule intact.
Underneath both, the town was built in layers, and the layer decides the job:
| Part of town | What it is | What changes about the work |
|---|---|---|
| Downtown and the Grant Avenue streets | The oldest housing, tighter lots, mature street trees | Small services, later wiring layered over original circuits, jointed cast iron and clay laterals with roots in them |
| The mid-century tracts through the middle | Ducted forced air, garages, attics and crawlspaces to work in | Access is easy, capacity is not. The service is adequate right up until a second large load arrives |
| Indian Valley and the west side hills | Longer driveways, steeper access, heavy tree cover | Equipment placement and solar shading get decided together. Most exposure to a planned shutoff |
| Hamilton and the flats toward the bay | Redeveloped former airfield and low-lying ground, including Bel Marin Keys | Salt air shortens the life of an outdoor coil. Low grade on a sewer line moves solids poorly from the day it is laid |
Why does the house cook on a July afternoon when the coast is under fog?
Because the fog does not get here. Marine air that parks over the coastal towns often stops well short of the north end of the county, so a July afternoon in Novato bears little relationship to the same afternoon fifteen miles southwest. A great many houses in this town were built with heating only, and their owners did not need cooling for the first thirty years they lived in them.
When someone calls about summer heat we usually find the same three things, in this order. Supply ducts running through an unconditioned attic, picking up heat before the air ever reaches the room. Return air undersized for the equipment, so the system cannot move what it makes. And unshaded west-facing glass doing its worst work after four in the afternoon, long after the thermostat thinks it has won.
Adding a condenser to an existing furnace is often possible, but only if the blower, the duct sizing and the electrical service can carry it. We run a room-by-room load calculation first, because sizing off floor area produces a machine that short-cycles, dehumidifies poorly and wears out early. Where there is no duct system at all, and this town has plenty of houses with wall furnaces and no distribution, a ductless heat pump answers both seasons with one piece of equipment and no ductwork to invent. The equipment detail sits on HVAC in Novato and AC repair in Novato.
One local wrinkle: down on the flats near the water, and in Bel Marin Keys especially, outdoor coils corrode faster than they do inland. That changes where a condenser goes, what coating it should have, and how often it wants rinsing.
Should I repair the furnace, replace it in kind, or move to a heat pump?
We run that decision through three checks, in order, and we do not skip to the third because it is the interesting one.
1. Safety. A cracked heat exchanger, a failed roll-out switch, a flue separated at a joint, or combustion air starved by a remodel that sealed the room are not repair-versus-replace questions. The equipment comes out of service until the condition is corrected. Nothing below this matters until safety is cleared. 2. Supply. If the system predates 2010 and runs R-22, refrigerant settles it. Production and import of R-22 into the United States ended in 2020, per EPA's phaseout schedule, and servicing existing equipment is the only allowable use left, so anything a technician puts back is reclaimed or previously stockpiled. R-410A equipment is a different case: EPA's technology transitions rule applies a 700 GWP limit to new residential and light commercial air conditioning and heat pumps, which is why new equipment has moved to lower-GWP refrigerants, but a working R-410A system should not be replaced on refrigerant grounds alone. 3. Sequence. This is the step homeowners get caught by, because it is about order rather than equipment. MCE's heat pump rebates go to customers who "own and have lived in their single-family detached homes for at least 12 months in MCE's service area," require a participating contractor to file the paperwork on your behalf, and cannot be applied to a project retroactively. MCE also states that "if your home has solar or EV charging, the equipment must have been installed for at least 12 months." Panel first, heat pump second is usually the right order. Heat pumps in Novato covers the equipment side, and furnace repair in Novato covers the other branch.
Will my electrical panel carry what I want to add?
This question sits underneath most of the others on this page, and the answer varies street to street inside one city.
On the older blocks near downtown we still routinely find services sized for a house with one large appliance, panels with every slot occupied, and boards for which no listed replacement breaker is still made. In the tracts east of Highway 101 we more often find a two-hundred-amp panel in a garage with room to work around it. Both are normal in Novato, which is exactly why a price for panel work given over the phone is worth very little.
The mechanism is additive load, not any single appliance. A heat pump water heater generally needs a 240-volt circuit that does not exist today. A ducted heat pump needs its own circuit, frequently with an auxiliary electric heat element behind it. A car charger is a continuous load and gets sized accordingly. Put all three on a small service and a calculation, not an opinion, decides whether it holds.
A service upgrade also brings PG&E into the schedule alongside the city, because the meter and everything upstream of it belongs to the utility rather than to you. Where a full upgrade is impractical, load management hardware that prevents two large loads from running simultaneously can sometimes keep a project inside the existing service. See panel upgrades in Novato and electrical in Novato.
What does it take to charge a car in a Novato garage?
A dedicated circuit, a load calculation and a permit, and the permit is not discretionary.
California Government Code 65850.7 takes the discretion out of it. Every jurisdiction has to run an expedited, streamlined process off a published checklist, and has to approve a compliant application administratively "through the issuance of a building permit or similar nondiscretionary permit." The statute then narrows what the building official is allowed to look at: review "shall be limited to the building official's review of whether it meets all health and safety requirements of local, state, and federal law." Aesthetics and neighbor opinion are not on that list.
The timing rules live in a separate section that gets misquoted constantly. Government Code 65850.71 works in two steps, and both run by operation of law rather than by anyone's goodwill. First, if the building official has neither deemed the application complete nor issued a written correction notice detailing the deficiencies inside five business days, it is complete anyway. Second, twenty business days after that, it is approved anyway, unless the official approved it, denied it, found a specific adverse impact on substantial evidence, or an appeal was filed. Sites with more than twenty-five stations run on ten and forty days instead. The statute also declares charging stations a matter of statewide concern rather than a municipal affair, so those rules reach charter cities too.
Two things are specific to this side of the county line. MCE's charger funding goes to property owners rather than to households: its EV charging program is for a "Workplace that will offer EV charging to employees and/or fleet," a "Multifamily property of four or more housing units," and "Commuter parking lots, such as a park & ride or ferry terminal." Its residential offer is MCE Sync, a smart-charging reward rather than money toward hardware, and the equipment rebate belongs to PG&E, which makes Community Choice Aggregation customers eligible. And the rate plan is part of the installation decision, not a follow-up. PG&E's electric vehicle rate plans put EV2-A on a single meter with off-peak hours from midnight to 3 p.m. daily and peak from 4 to 9 p.m., while EV-B "separates your vehicle's electricity costs from those of your home, and requires the installation of a second meter." EV-B customers also "cannot enroll in the following programs: SmartRate, Medical Baseline, CARE and FERA," which EV2-A customers keep. That second meter is an electrical scope item, so it belongs in the conversation before the wire goes in the wall. A third plan, E-ELEC, covers households adding an electric vehicle, battery storage or an electric heat pump. Being partly electric is enough; the whole house does not have to be. Installation detail is on EV charger installation in Novato.
Why is Novato water harder than the water in central Marin?
Because Novato is on a different utility drawing from different sources, and the local one is the harder of the two.
North Marin Water District publishes both streams in its Novato 2025 Annual Water Quality Report. Its own Stafford Lake treatment plant "produces about 25% of the water needed for Novato," and that supply averages 91 mg/L of hardness. The rest is bought from Sonoma County Water Agency and "collected from gravel beds 80-100 feet below and adjacent to the Russian River," sometimes blended with SCWA wells in the Santa Rosa plain, and it averages 110 mg/L. The report converts those figures itself: 5.3 grains per gallon for the local supply and 6.4 for the purchased one.
That is worth pausing on, because it inverts the pattern in the rest of the county. In central and southern Marin the local reservoir water is the soft one and the imported Russian River supply is the harder one. In Novato the local supply is harder than the import, and neither stream is soft. Practically:
- Storage tanks accumulate sediment faster than a homeowner used to central Marin expects, which is an argument for actually flushing the tank rather than intending to.
- Tankless heat exchangers scale on a schedule set by this water, not by the interval printed in the manual. We set descaling intervals on what we find inside the unit.
- Anode rods do real work here and are worth inspecting rather than assuming.
More on that work sits at water heaters in Novato, tankless water heaters in Novato and plumbing in Novato.
Is my gas water heater about to be outlawed?
No, and the version of this story circulating locally is more alarming than the rule.
All of Novato is inside the Bay Area Air Quality Management District, which names Marin among its counties without any partial qualification on its about page. The district's building appliance rulemaking phases in zero-NOx standards: 2027 for tank-type water heaters up to 75,000 BTU per hour, which is the typical small residential unit, 2029 for furnaces under 175,000 BTU per hour, and 2031 for larger tank units and for tankless water heaters.
Three qualifications belong with those dates. They govern the sale and installation of new equipment rather than anything already fitted. The district states that the requirements "apply only upon burn out of one's current equipment," so the trigger is your appliance failing rather than a date arriving. And because the district notes that "currently, the only zero NOx appliances available are electric appliances," the practical destination is heat pump equipment, which makes the panel question part of the water heater question.
The other story homeowners arrive with is that California bans gas appliances in 2030. The Air Resources Board's FAQ on the Clean Space and Water Heater Standards says the regulation "has not been finalized," that no formal proposal has been submitted to its board, and that "you can still use or repair your existing space and water heaters after 2030."
Two requirements do apply today, and both get skipped. Seismic bracing under California Health and Safety Code section 19211 is broader than most homeowners assume, because it reaches existing units and not only new ones, for any standard heater "with a capacity of not more than 120 gallons for which a preengineered strapping kit is readily available." Two straps, upper and lower third, is the heart of the obligation, and it is among the most common reasons an inspection does not pass the first time. Separately, every replacement has to satisfy Title 24, and California's 2025 Building Energy Efficiency Standards have been in effect since January 1, 2026. That cycle moved single-family new construction to a single fuel baseline with a heat pump prescriptively required for both water heating and space heating, which governs new houses rather than the tank sitting in your garage today.
Why does the drain only back up in winter, and who pays to fix the lateral?
The winter pattern has a documented cause, and Novato is one of the few places where somebody else helps pay to fix it.
Novato Sanitary District, which provides sewer service here rather than the city, explains the seasonality from its own side: "in winter, old and leaky sewer laterals are often a significant source of rainwater infiltration and inflow (or 'I/I') that can quickly overwhelm public sewer systems and result in sewage spills and overflows." That is the same physics you feel inside the house. Roots narrow a jointed cast iron or clay line gradually over years, which you notice only as a tub draining slightly worse each month. Then groundwater rises, the line is already running full of water that should not be in it, and the first serious storm asks it for everything at once.
The lateral is yours. The district defines it as running from roughly two feet outside the foundation "to and including the connection to the public sewer main in the street," and states the owner "is therefore responsible for all costs relating to the installation, connection, maintenance, repair, construction, alteration, abandonment or removal of the sewer lateral." That includes the portion under the pavement.
What is unusual here is the Lateral Grant Program. The district contributes half the cost of replacing a lateral, up to a published maximum, and the sequence is strict enough that getting it wrong disqualifies you:
1. Apply first. The district is blunt about it: "any work performed prior to this process will make the grant application null and void." 2. Get three written bids from licensed contractors on the district's own list, and submit them with the application. 3. Wait to be contacted. Approval comes back as a letter of obligation, and only then may work begin. 4. Replace the entire lateral. Repairs and partial replacements are excluded, which the district states explicitly.
Grants go out first come, first served until that year's allocated funds are gone, so a homeowner who has already been told the line is failing is better off starting the paperwork than waiting for the backup that forces the timing.
A camera inspection is what makes any of this decidable. Cabling a line clears it and tells you nothing: root intrusion at one joint, a belly holding standing water, an offset joint and a structurally failed section all feel identical from the cleanout and call for four different repairs. See sewer repair in Novato and drain cleaning in Novato.
Does solar still pay on a Novato roof?
The inland position that creates the cooling demand also makes the roof productive, and the two line up neatly, because the hottest afternoons are the sunniest ones.
What changed is the value of an exported kilowatt-hour. Under the CPUC's Net Billing Tariff, compensation for excess generation is set "at a rate reflecting the value of this generation to the grid," the earlier net metering tariffs are "closed to new enrollments," and onsite generation "is first used to serve onsite load." So the design question has moved from how large an array will fit to how much of what you make you can use or store on site.
Three physical constraints come up over and over in this town. Roof age, because mounting an array on a roof with a few years left is a cost you pay twice. Afternoon shade, particularly on the west side around Indian Valley where the tree cover is heaviest and still growing. And panel capacity, because the main breaker rating and the busbar rating together decide whether an array can back-feed through a breaker or needs a different interconnection method entirely.
Billing involves both organizations, with MCE supplying generation and PG&E handling delivery and the meter. Storage is also what makes an array useful during an outage, since a grid-tied system without a battery shuts down the moment the utility line goes dead. Start at solar in Novato.
What happens in the house when PG&E turns the power off?
The hillside parts of town carry the most exposure. PG&E's Public Safety Power Shutoff program de-energizes lines when the forecast combines wind, low humidity and dry fuel, and whether a given street is affected depends on the circuit rather than the city boundary. PG&E says it will "always do our best to alert you before a PSPS," but also that "in some cases we may not send the first alert until the same day your power is shut off."
What surprises people is how much of the house is electric even when they think it is not. A gas furnace still needs power for its blower, igniter and controls, so it stops. A heat pump has no fuel of its own. A tankless water heater needs power to ignite. And on the low-lying properties toward the bay, a sump pump or a sewage ejector stops too, which is the failure that does damage rather than inconvenience.
Two answers are reasonable, and which one is right depends on your load list and your lot. A standby generator sized against an actual list of circuits, wired through a transfer arrangement so it cannot back-feed the utility line, runs as long as you can supply it with fuel, and we are a Certified Generac Generator installer. A battery is silent, needs no fuel and recharges from an array through a multi-day event, but storage on its own eventually runs down. We will tell you when the sensible answer is a portable unit and a properly installed interlock instead of either.
Who issues my permit, and does my address change the answer?
It does, and two neighboring properties can fall on opposite sides of the line.
Inside city limits, the City of Novato Building Division issues and inspects. If the parcel is unincorporated, the Marin County Community Development Agency is the authority instead, with its own process and its own queue. A Novato mailing address does not settle the question, so we confirm jurisdiction from the parcel before anything is filed.
Water heater replacement, furnace and air conditioning replacement, service and panel work, sewer lateral replacement, solar and a car charger circuit all require permits. Sewer work adds the second agency, because the lateral itself falls to Novato Sanitary District rather than to the building department. We pull permits under our own license and meet the inspector. Work that was never permitted has a way of surfacing at resale, when there is no time left to fix it calmly.
Which rebates can a Novato homeowner use today?
- MCE heat pump rebates cover heat pump space heating and heat pump water heating, with the ownership, residency, participating-contractor and no-retroactive-application conditions described above. This is the main local option for equipment.
- Novato Sanitary District's lateral grant is the one most homeowners have never heard of, and it is money toward a sewer replacement rather than a heating appliance. Apply before any work starts.
- MCE's charger rebate is for property owners, not households. The levers on a home charger are PG&E's residential charger rebate, which covers Community Choice Aggregation customers, MCE Sync for smart charging, and your PG&E rate plan.
- Sonoma Clean Power offers do not reach Novato. SCP serves Sonoma County. Novato sits a short drive from that county line and still inside MCE territory.
Eligibility follows the account and the program's current conditions rather than the street, so we confirm what a specific project qualifies for at the time we quote it.
What drives the price of a job like this?
Access, first. A furnace in a garage with room on three sides is a different labor picture from the same furnace in a hall closet where the only route out is through drywall. Crawlspace height, attic clearance and a steep Indian Valley driveway all move the number before anyone opens a toolbox.
Then the scope you cannot see from the street. Duct that has to be resized, a flue that no longer meets clearance once the appliance changes, a gas line undersized for a larger burner, a lateral that turns out to be failing rather than merely blocked.
Electrical dependency is the swing factor on any electrification project. If the right circuit exists and the service has headroom, the job is the appliance. If not, the job is the appliance plus a circuit, and sometimes plus a service upgrade with the utility in the schedule.
Last, equipment tier and control strategy. Single-stage against variable capacity, a basic thermostat against zoned control, a standard tank against a heat pump model with a mixing valve.
What maintenance keeps this equipment from failing early?
Heating and cooling. Filter changes on the interval the house needs rather than the one printed on the box, coil cleaning, a condensate line cleared before cooling season, and a charge check. A system running low on refrigerant has a leak; it does not need a top-up. Equipment near the water wants rinsing more often than the manual suggests.
Plumbing. Descaling for tankless units on an interval set by what we find inside them, anode rod inspection on storage tanks, and periodic camera work on any lateral that has had roots in it, because roots come back to the same joint they found the first time.
Electrical. Torque checks on panel terminations, GFCI and AFCI testing, and a look at anything a previous owner added without a permit. Heat at a loose connection comes before the fire.
Solar and storage. Monitoring is the maintenance. An array that quietly loses a string will not tell you.
Our maintenance plans cover the recurring items on a schedule rather than a memory.
Which parts of Novato do you work in?
All of it, and the differences between areas are the point rather than a formality.
Downtown and the streets off Grant Avenue hold the oldest housing, where we most often find undersized services, decades of wiring layered over original circuits, and heating added to a house never designed to carry ducts. Indian Valley and the hillside streets on the west side bring longer runs, steeper access and heavy tree cover, which ties equipment placement and solar design together. Hamilton, redeveloped from the old airfield, and the newer tracts east of Highway 101 generally give us a garage with room to work and a panel with capacity to spare. Bel Marin Keys sits low and close to salt water, and everything outdoors there is on a shorter clock. We also cover the unincorporated pockets around the city, where the permit authority changes even though the mailing address does not.
Novato is the northern end of the county we started in. Marin County has the wider picture, and each trade has a county view: heating and cooling, plumbing, electrical and solar.
What North Bay homeowners say
They worked for two full days including all new ductwork and they were all very polite and professional, my wife and I are real impressed.
Michael E.
Our 55 plus year old home needed its sewer connections replaced. Ogaro’s Abel came out and did a complete assessment of the situation. He worked out a solution and we accepted the bid. Very pleased with the professionalism!
Joanne T.
How do I get on the schedule?
Book online and pick a window, or tell us what the house is doing and we will explain what a diagnostic visit involves before anyone drives out. On a replacement rather than a repair, we walk the equipment location, look at the panel, and put the permit path in writing as part of the proposal. Financing is available on replacements, and you can read what customers say or more about the company. The rest of our Novato coverage: HVAC, heat pumps, furnace repair, AC repair, plumbing, water heaters, tankless water heaters, sewer repair, drain cleaning, electrical, panel upgrades, EV charger installation and solar.
What else do Novato homeowners ask?
Who is the best home services company in Novato?
Compare on terms you can check. Ongaro & Sons has operated continuously since 1932, when the company was founded in Marin, and holds C-20 HVAC, C-36 plumbing and C-10 electrical classifications in house rather than subcontracting the trades it lacks. It is Diamond Certified, carries a BBB A+ Rating, and averages 4.8 stars across 2,745 Google reviews. Add two questions of your own: who pulls the permit, and will you show me the load calculation.
Does a house in Novato really need air conditioning?
More often than a house in the coastal towns of the same county. This is one of the warmer inland pockets of Marin, and the marine layer that moderates summer afternoons closer to the ocean frequently stops short of here. Houses built for heating alone reach a point where upstairs rooms become unusable during a hot stretch. Whether cooling is worth adding depends less on the forecast than on whether the existing ducts and electrical service can carry it.
Why is Novato tap water harder than water in the rest of Marin?
Different utility, different sources. North Marin Water District blends water from its own Stafford Lake plant, which supplies about a quarter of Novato's demand, with Russian River water purchased from Sonoma County Water Agency. The district's own report puts the purchased Russian River supply at about 6.4 grains per gallon and the local Stafford supply at about 5.3. The imported stream is the harder of the two, and neither is soft enough to ignore when planning tankless descaling.
Does the sewer district really pay toward replacing my lateral?
Novato Sanitary District runs a lateral grant covering half the cost of replacing an entire lateral, up to a published maximum, issued first come first served until each year's funds run out. Three conditions catch people. You must apply before any work begins or the application is void. You must submit three written bids from licensed contractors on the district's list. And repairs and partial replacements are excluded, so it applies only to replacing the whole line.
Can I keep using my gas water heater after 2027?
Yes. The air district standard governs what may be sold and installed after each compliance date, not what is already in your garage, and the district states there is no mandate to remove or replace functioning appliances before they fail. Small tank-type units fall in the 2027 group, furnaces under 175,000 BTU per hour in 2029, and larger tanks and tankless units in 2031.
Will a heat pump keep up on a cold Novato morning?
For the temperatures this part of Marin sees, yes. Current cold-climate models hold usable capacity well below anything typical here, and a properly designed system carries auxiliary electric heat as a backstop for the coldest hours. The variable that matters more than outdoor temperature is airflow: a heat pump moves more air at a lower supply temperature than the furnace it replaces, so undersized ducts limit the result more than the weather does.
Do I need a panel upgrade before adding solar or a heat pump?
Sometimes, and a load calculation is the only way to know. What decides it is the existing service size, how much of it is already committed, and for solar the busbar rating and main breaker size that govern how an array is allowed to connect. Plenty of Novato homes east of the freeway have room to spare. Plenty of older ones downtown do not, and discovering that after equipment has been ordered is the expensive version of finding out.
Why does my drain back up in winter and behave all summer?
Two things stack up. Root intrusion narrows a jointed line gradually over years without producing a dramatic symptom, so the pipe spends summers coping at partial capacity. Then winter groundwater rises, leaky joints admit rainwater the line was never meant to carry, and the sanitation district sees the same effect across its whole system as infiltration and inflow. A line that managed all summer fails the first week something asks it for everything at once.
Will a home battery keep the lights on during a planned shutoff?
It can, within limits. A grid-tied array without storage shuts down when the utility de-energizes the line, so the battery is what makes solar useful while the power is out. Sizing depends on which circuits you want carried and for how long, and a heat pump running through the night is a very different ask from a refrigerator and a router. For multi-day outages with a long load list, a fuel-burning standby unit is often the more practical answer.
Do you work outside Novato city limits?
Yes, in the unincorporated areas surrounding the city as well as inside it. The practical differences are the permit authority, which becomes the Marin County Community Development Agency, and the site conditions, since parcels outside the city tend toward longer driveways and more distance between the equipment and the panel. Water and sewer service can also differ at the edges, so we confirm which districts serve the parcel before quoting anything that touches either.
How quickly does the city have to act on a car charger permit?
State law caps the delay rather than leaving it to local discretion. Government Code 65850.71 puts two clocks on a home charger application. The first is five business days, after which the application counts as complete unless the official has already deemed it so or issued a written correction notice listing the deficiencies. The second is twenty business days from that point, after which it counts as approved unless the official acted, denied it, found a specific adverse impact on substantial evidence, or an appeal was filed. Those are ceilings on delay, not a promised turnaround date.