Commercial HVAC
HVAC for offices, hotels, schools, restaurants and care environments.
What we offer
Commercial premises need HVAC that works around the business. We schedule work for minimum disruption and provide the paperwork your facilities team needs.
Commercial work is rarely constrained by the engineering. It is constrained by the fact that the building is trading. An office in Newbury town centre, a restaurant in Hungerford, a school in Thatcham and a unit off the A34 all need the same technical decisions made, but the route to actually getting the work done differs completely, and that is what gets planned first. Before quoting we want to know your opening hours, who holds the keys, when the building is genuinely empty, and what noise, dust or isolation the neighbouring units will tolerate.
Who owns the equipment is worth settling early, and it matters twice. Under a full repairing and insuring lease the tenant normally carries maintenance of plant within the demise, while landlord-owned plant serving the whole building is recovered through the service charge. Cassettes fitted by a previous tenant sit in a grey area with no records attached. The question returns at lease end, where neglected equipment reappears as a dilapidations claim, so a condition report and a maintenance history are worth having long before that conversation starts.
The most common commercial call is not a failure at all — it is complaints. One side of the floor is stifling, the other has coats on, and someone has taped cardboard over a grille. Nine times out of ten the causes are unglamorous: two systems fighting each other, a sensor mounted above a printer or in direct sun, controllers left in the wrong mode, filters loaded solid, or a refit that put twelve people and a bank of screens into a zone designed for six. Diagnosis and rebalancing usually beat new equipment.
If your building has air conditioning or refrigeration, the F-Gas regulations place duties on you as the operator of the equipment, not only on the engineer who visits. Systems holding five tonnes or more of CO2 equivalent must be leak-checked at least every twelve months, fifty tonnes every six months, and five hundred tonnes every three months with automatic leak detection fitted; where leak detection is installed, those intervals extend. Records of checks, and of any refrigerant added or recovered, have to be kept for at least five years, and they do get asked for.
Planned visits on a trading building are as much about timing as content. Cooling wants checking in March, not during the first hot week of July when every contractor in the county is already committed. Heating wants looking at in September. Alongside that, an asset register listing each unit, its location, model, refrigerant charge and age turns replacement from an emergency into a planned item — you know which units are ageing and can programme them into a shoulder season instead of discovering it when one dies in a heatwave.
Different premises fail in different ways. Schools have a short, crowded holiday window and a firm view on who is on site during term. Restaurants and pubs live or die on extract and make-up air, and a kitchen drawing its air from the dining room leaves customers sitting in a draught. Retail units have roof access controlled by the landlord and shopfront doors propped open all summer. Care settings cannot tolerate cold rooms or long outages at all. The technical work overlaps; the scheduling, permits and contingency planning do not.
- Offices, retail, hospitality, schools and care settings
- Out-of-hours and phased installation work
- Comfort-complaint diagnosis and rebalancing
- Planned visits timed around your trading year
- Written reports, asset registers and compliance records
- 24-hour reactive cover for trading premises
- Fit-out, refurbishment and end-of-life replacement planning
Common questions
- We lease our unit — is the air conditioning our responsibility or the landlord's?
- It depends on the lease and on where the equipment sits. Under a typical full repairing and insuring lease, plant inside your demise is yours to maintain, while central plant serving the whole building is the landlord's and recovered through the service charge. Units installed by a previous tenant are the usual grey area. We can survey and report on condition so you can raise it with the managing agent with evidence behind it.
- Half the office is too hot and half is too cold — do we need a new system?
- Rarely, at least not straight away. The usual culprits are systems in opposing modes fighting one another, a sensor sited above heat-generating equipment or in sunlight, dirty filters restricting airflow, or an office layout that changed without the zoning changing with it. We measure temperatures and airflows across the floor first, and quote for equipment only if rebalancing and controls work cannot resolve it.
- Are we legally required to have our air conditioning leak-checked?
- If the system holds at least five tonnes of CO2 equivalent of refrigerant, yes — the F-Gas regulations place that duty on the operator of the equipment, normally the occupying business. Twelve-monthly checks apply from five tonnes, six-monthly from fifty and three-monthly from five hundred, and records of the checks plus any gas added or recovered must be kept for at least five years.
- We are fitting out a new unit — when should HVAC be involved?
- As early as the layout is being drawn. Partitioning an open floor into meeting rooms leaves supply and extract terminals serving the wrong volumes, and a room that was comfortable becomes stuffy twenty minutes into a meeting. Bringing the mechanical side in at layout stage lets zoning, terminal positions and any additional capacity be resolved on paper, which is far easier than reworking a ceiling that has already been closed.
- What do you need from us before the first visit?
- The site address and access arrangements, who to speak to on the day, and any induction or permit process to follow. If you have them: an asset list or previous service records, plantroom and roof access details, and confirmation of who can authorise work. If you have none of that, we will build an asset register during the first visit — a great many sites do not have one.
- Our system uses R22 or R410A — what does the refrigerant phase-down mean for us?
- R22 cannot legally be topped up at all, so those systems are replacements once they fail. R410A remains legal but is being phased down, which makes both gas and spares progressively harder to source. Neither is a reason to replace working equipment tomorrow, but it is a reason to know what you have, and to plan any change into spring or autumn rather than reacting in August.
Related services
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Kitchen Extract Systems
Extract systems for commercial kitchens — designed, installed and cleaned.
Talk to an engineer today
Free consultation, fast quotes and 24/7 emergency cover.
Areas We Cover
Commercial HVAC across Newbury, Reading, Basingstoke, Oxford, London and the wider South of England — covering Berkshire, Hampshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Dorset and Somerset.