Sometimes the right answer is to spend the money on a different trade
Zenith works on heating, cooling and ventilation across Costa Mesa and the towns around it. We are good at sizing, installing and maintaining equipment. We are also willing to tell you when equipment is not your problem, which is the part of this trade nobody advertises.
Before you ring us
Five complaints crossed with four kinds of building envelope. What insulation, air sealing and glazing actually do to a cooling problem, and why the order you spend money in changes the size of the system you end up buying.
The order you spend in decides what you buy
Insulation, air sealing and glazing reduce the load. Reduce the load and the system you need gets smaller, cheaper to buy and cheaper to run. Do it the other way round and you buy a machine sized for a house you are about to change.
That sequence costs us money on roughly one job in five, and it is still the right sequence.
What we will not do
We do not sell insulation and we will not quote it. There is no version of this page where we recommend work and then price it ourselves. We will tell you what the house needs, in writing, and you can take that to whoever does it.
Six things
Repair
No cooling and no heat, checked in order of cost, with the reading that proves the answer shown to you rather than described.
Annual service
Charge verified by superheat and subcooling, coil and drain cleaned, combustion tested on gas heat, and the readings written down.
Load calculations
Done on the house you will have, not the one you have now. If work is planned on the envelope, it goes into the calculation.
Duct testing
Leakage and static pressure measured, then sealed where the measurement says to. Attic duct in this county is a bigger lever than most people expect.
Replacement
Sized from the building, permitted and tested — and only after we have said whether the building should change first.
Premises
Rooftop packaged units, split systems, extract and make-up air, and planned maintenance twice a year for retail, studios, offices and light industrial.
Houses
Costa Mesa is mostly post-war single storey with attic ducts and, in a great many cases, the insulation it was built with. That combination is why so many houses here have a hot bedroom and a system that has been blamed for it for thirty years.
Premises
Retail, studios, offices and light industrial across the city and into Santa Ana. Packaged rooftop units, extract with the make-up air it needs, and a written record per machine rather than a pile of invoices.
Six things this website does not print
| Insulation prices | We do not sell insulation and we will not quote it. Recommending work and pricing it yourself is how advice stops being advice. We will tell you what the house needs and you take it elsewhere. |
| Prices | A load calculation, duct work and equipment are three different jobs with three different answers. A figure here would be a guess. |
| A response time | We do not publish one. We will tell you where you are in the queue when you ring. |
| Savings percentages | No figure for insulation, glazing, equipment or anything else. It depends on the house, the summer and what you set it to. |
| Reviews and ratings | There are none on this site. When there are real ones they will be somewhere you can check them. |
Asked most often
Why would a heating and cooling contractor tell me to buy insulation?
Because it changes what you should buy from us. Insulation and air sealing reduce how much heat gets into the house, which reduces the load, which means the system you need is smaller — cheaper to buy, cheaper to run, and usually more comfortable because it runs longer at a lower output. Do it the other way round and you buy a machine sized for a house you are about to change. We do not sell insulation and we will not quote it, which is what makes the advice worth having.
Do you install insulation as well?
No, and we will not quote it. Recommending work and then pricing it yourself is how advice stops being advice. What we will do is tell you in writing what the house needs and what to ask an insulation contractor for. We do not take referral fees either.
The house cools fine in the morning and loses ground by four. Is the system too small?
Possibly, and usually not. A system that holds the house all morning and slips two or three degrees on the hottest week of the year is behaving normally — equipment is sized for a design condition, not the worst afternoon of the decade. If it is losing more than that, the usual cause here is a pair: thin attic insulation letting heat through the ceiling, and leaky duct in that same attic pulling 130-degree air into the system.
We already have new windows and good insulation, and it is still uncomfortable.
Then the building is no longer the variable, which narrows things a great deal. It will be duct leakage, static pressure too high for the system, a return path that cannot get air back, airflow never balanced after somebody worked on it — or a system that is now too big, because it was sized before the upgrade and nobody redid the sums. An oversized system in a tight house feels exactly like inadequate cooling.
Is a bigger system the safe choice?
No, it is a different set of problems. An oversized system satisfies the thermostat quickly and stops, and because dehumidification only happens while the machine runs you get a house that is cold and still feels heavy. It also short cycles, which is hard on the compressor and the contactor, and it often needs larger ductwork that is not in the quote.
Which areas do you cover?
Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Newport Beach, Tustin and Westminster.
Newport Boulevard, Costa Mesa
1574 Newport Blvd, Costa Mesa, CA 92627. We cover Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Fountain Valley, Huntington Beach, Irvine, Newport Beach, Tustin and Westminster.
Monday to Friday, 7.30am to 4.30pm. (949) 703-9897