Bonded & insured
Contractor's bond, general liability and workers' compensation in force. Certificates issued on request before work starts.
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A shop that argues about wall positions
Most HVAC decisions are technical. In the houses we work on, the important ones are not, and that is the difference we have built the business around.
Who we are
Small, local, and interested in the houses
VibeCraft works out of Grant Road in Mountain View. Los Altos, Palo Alto, Sunnyvale and Cupertino are fifteen or twenty minutes away, and almost everything we do is inside that ring.
The speciality came from the work rather than the other way round. Once you have spent a season on post-and-beam houses you start noticing things — which wall can take a line set, which elevation a condenser should never face, how differently a slab house behaves from a framed one — and homeowners in those tracts talk to each other.
Most weeks still include perfectly ordinary ducted systems in perfectly ordinary houses. We are glad of those too.
How we work
Four things we will not bend on
- Positions before prices
- Where every indoor unit, line set and condenser goes is agreed with you, on site, before there is a number on anything. On these houses that decision is the job, and it should not be made by a technician on install day with a drill already in his hand.
- A price before the work
- Scope and figure in writing. If something else appears once a panel is off, we stop and re-quote rather than continuing and explaining on the invoice.
- No commission on equipment
- Nobody here earns more by selling a bigger system. It is the only arrangement under which "your load is one glass wall, fix the shading instead" can be an honest recommendation.
- The elevation matters
- Line sets run vertically, in rigid trunking, painted to match. Penetrations are sleeved, sealed and placed where they belong. We do not run a diagonal across the front of a house because it would save an hour.
Credentials
The boring part that protects you
Ask any contractor for these before they touch your house. We would rather you did.
Refrigerant handling
EPA Section 608 certified technicians, proper recovery equipment, and refrigerant handled and recorded as the regulations require.
Permits & Title 24
We pull the permit on changeouts that need one, prepare the Title 24 documentation, schedule the inspection and hand over the closed permit.
Being straight about it
What we do not take on
Knowing what to decline is most of what keeps a small shop good at the rest.
- Commercial rooftop work and refrigeration. Different equipment, different trade — we will point you at someone who does it.
- Jobs a long way outside the mid-Peninsula. If we cannot get back quickly when something needs attention, we should not have taken it.
- Installing equipment somebody else supplied. We warranty what we fit, which means we have to choose it.
- Cutting into a beam ceiling or building a soffit across a feature plane, whatever the schedule says. There is always another answer.
- Replacing a radiant slab that still works, because a forced-air system would be a simpler sale.
Still deciding who to call?
A design visit costs nothing and you keep the plan either way.