The questions this metro asks, in the order the seasons ask them
Our furnace ran perfectly in March. The first cold night in November, it would not start. What happened in between?
Most likely, nothing happened in November; it happened across the quiet months. Rest is not a neutral condition for machinery: a film dries over the flame sensor, an ignitor ages unlit in the dark, seals stiffen, and a furnace that sits from April to November can be dying the whole time it looks innocent. On this map a furnace's calendar age and its working age separate widely: a twelve-year-old unit here may carry fewer hard hours than a six-year-old unit in a colder state, and still be dead on the first freeze, killed by rest rather than by wear. The good news, read honestly, is that rest failures are usually the gentle repairs. A single warm-up run on a mild October evening surfaces them inside an hour, in a week when a finding is still cheap.
The man at our door says the heat exchanger is cracked and the furnace has to go today. How do we judge that?
Carefully, and by evidence. A cracked heat exchanger is a real and serious finding: the exchanger is the wall between the fire and your air, a crack in it is a carbon monoxide conversation, and a cracked exchanger is not repaired, it is the end of that furnace. Precisely because it is serious, it is a finding that can be shown. The crack itself can be pointed to. The flame's behavior when the blower starts can be watched. A crew that found a real crack can show you a real crack, on the spot, in plain light. A crew that cannot show you one has given you a different finding than it thinks, and a cold house at nine at night is exactly when that difference gets expensive. Get the evidence, then decide. The furnace will still be there in the morning, and in the meantime a space heater and a closed bedroom door are a safer night than a signature you cannot test.
Will a heat pump actually heat an Indianapolis house in winter?
Yes, with one honest condition attached. Heat pumps shine in the winter this region usually serves, and they lean on their backup in the winter it occasionally serves, and both behaviors are the design working as designed. A heat pump moves heat rather than making it, and through an ordinary Indiana cold stretch, lows in the teens and 20s, afternoons that climb back, moving heat is efficient work. Through a snap week, temperature parked below zero for days, the auxiliary strips carry more of the load, and the electric bill reports it. The failure worth hunting is the quiet one: an outdoor unit that died in October and a system that has heated on strips alone ever since, looking for all the world like a billing problem months before it looks like a heating problem. If the house still heats but the winter bill jumped, suspect the strips, and tell us the month the bill moved. That month is when it happened.
Our system held 60 degrees through the whole December 2022 storm. Is that a pass or a fail? How do we judge a system against it?
Carefully, because that week asked more of equipment than equipment is built to give. Systems are sized against cold nights, not against an entire region sitting below freezing under high wind for the better part of a week. A furnace or heat pump that kept a house near 60 through the whole storm may simply have been delivering its entire design capacity, every hour, without rest. The fairer test is an ordinary hard night: one freeze, a deep drop, the winter weather this region actually gets most years. Answer that test and the recovery record is sound, whatever 2022 felt like. Fail an ordinary freeze, though, and the failure is a finding in any year. The storm measures the week, not your system.
The AC cools the downstairs and the upstairs gives up every evening. Is one of our systems dying?
Maybe, and maybe it is only losing the recovery argument. In the two-story plans across the north arc, the upstairs carries the roof's heat and the day's rising warm air, and it works the harder shift of the two. A system that held the same upstairs through the humid weeks five years ago and cannot now has lost something specific. One that never held it in a 90s run was sized for the plan on paper, not for the summer the house actually gets. In single-system houses the same symptom often lives in the duct run to the far rooms, or in a damper that has stopped opening for the upstairs zone. Sorting out which of those is yours takes a recovery reading, not a hunch.
One wing of our house ignores its thermostat. The rest of the house is fine. Is the system broken?
Probably not, and in a zoned house that symptom points at the controls far more often than at the equipment. Across the growth ring, large plans split into zones, each with a thermostat of its own and a damper in the ductwork opening and closing on command. Let a damper motor tire, a zone board stop relaying, a thermostat die on the wall, or a sensor drift a couple of degrees from the truth, and that wing lives cold in January or warm in July while the machine itself serves the other zones without a fault to its name. The search runs through the low-voltage half of the house in order: thermostat, board, damper, sensor, until the silent component identifies itself. When you call, tell Karen which wing, and whether its thermostat lights up; lit and dark send the visit down different roads from the first minute.
Our house has radiators and a boiler, not a furnace. Is that something you repair?
It is not, and we would rather say so on the phone than bill you for the visit. Boiler and radiator systems survive across the oldest streetcar stock in this city, Irvington, Broad Ripple, the Old Northside, and they are a different bench with different tools: they belong to a heating company that works on boilers every week. If your house has a furnace or a heat pump, that is our bench, in either season, and the same goes for the cooling side. Asking costs nothing either way.
The house stays warm, so why did January's electric bill come in at twice the usual?
In a heat pump house, read the electric bill the way you would read a chart at the foot of a hospital bed: it records what the house has actually been doing. The likeliest story behind a doubled bill is that the outdoor unit quit carrying its share, from a fault, a lost charge, or an emergency-heat setting somebody switched on during a snap and never switched back, and the strips have heated the house alone ever since. Strip heat works, and strip heat is priced by the kilowatt; that pairing is precisely how a house stays comfortable while its meter spins faster every week. Start at the thermostat's mode setting, which costs nothing to look at. Then call with the month the bill changed. That month is when the failure began, and giving Karen that date shortens the diagnosis more than any symptom you could describe to her.
How fast can you get to us?
Speed here is a routing fact before it is anything else: the crew works a single metro in corridor runs, and a call on today's corridor is a short drive from the last one. Calls close in, and along the north corridors where most of the work already lives, are seen the same day most days. West and south calls gather along their interstates, and the far corners, Lebanon at the northwest end, Franklin at the south, run on named days each week. A house in genuine trouble, no heat on a freeze night, no cooling during a heat run with somebody fragile inside, jumps to the front of its day whatever the run sheet says. None of that is a bolted-on promise; it is simply what three people working one metro can honestly do, and Karen would rather give you a real day than a hopeful hour.
What does a repair cost around Indianapolis?
Start with the planning ranges, and read them the way Mike reads an ice log: as the shape of a season, not a promise about your house. Cooling work here generally runs $200 to $900, and the capacitor, the part that gives up more often than any other in an Indianapolis summer, usually falls between $150 and $350. Heat pump work generally runs $250 to $950, while furnace work runs $150 to $700. Treat every one of those numbers as a typical planning range for this market and nothing firmer than that. Your price will move with your home, your equipment, and the access to it, and the contractor confirms your own figure with you before any work begins. That figure grows out of your own finding, and it reaches you alongside an estimate that costs nothing, obliges you to nothing, and pressures you toward nothing. Both tables in full sit on the AC repair and heating repair pages.