HVAC SERVICES IN FORT COLLINS, CO

By the team at Homegrown Heating and Air Conditioning.

Every HVAC Service We Provide in Fort Collins

We handle the full range of residential heating and cooling work in the city:

• AC repair and AC installation
• Furnace repair, and furnace installation and replacement
• Heating maintenance and tune-ups
• Heat pump installation and repair
• Indoor air quality testing and equipment
• Whole-home humidifiers
• Ductwork repair, sealing and installation
• Smart thermostat installation
• Ductless mini-splits
• Emergency HVAC repair, same-day, seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.

One crew covers all of it, which matters more here than it does elsewhere, because the City treats the duct system, the equipment and the controls as one installation that has to be measured together.

Fort Collins Makes Installers Prove the System Works

Most jurisdictions inspect an HVAC installation. Fort Collins tests it.

The City’s amended mechanical code, Section 111.3, requires that installed heating, cooling and ventilation systems be performance tested by an approved agency and adjusted to operate within design specifications, in accordance with the ANSI/ACCA QI 5 HVAC Quality Installation Specification. Documentation of the results has to be submitted to the building official before approval. A parallel residential provision, new IRC Section M1309.1, ties the same testing to the certificate of occupancy. Both sit in the 2024 code package on the City of Fort Collins building code page.

Very few jurisdictions in the country ask for this. Most stop at a visual inspection of clearances, venting and gas piping.

The City’s residential performance report is where the requirement becomes concrete. It asks for measured numbers, not checkboxes:

• Total duct leakage, measured and corrected to local elevation rather than sea level
• Whole-house ventilation airflow
• External static pressure across the equipment
• Temperature rise across the heat exchanger, against the manufacturer’s stamped range
• Refrigerant charge verified by subcooling, superheat and approach, with pass or fail criteria
• Room-by-room airflow and pressure balance
• Combustion safety and system control operation

Here is why that protects you. An oversized system, a duct system that leaks a third of its air into a crawlspace, or a condenser charged by feel will all still light, cool and pass a visual look. They fail on the meter. Testing catches the install problems that otherwise surface three winters later as a cold back bedroom, a short-cycling furnace or a compressor that dies early.

We build every Fort Collins installation to that standard: room-by-room Manual J loads, ACCA Manual S equipment selection, Manual D duct design, and measured commissioning numbers you get a copy of.

What 5,004 Feet Does to Equipment Here

Fort Collins sits at about 5,004 feet and runs roughly 5,918 heating degree days a year. The heating season effectively runs September through May.

Elevation matters twice. Gas input has to be adjusted for altitude anywhere above 2,000 feet, and the adjustment comes from the manufacturer’s high-altitude listing for that model. Air is also about 17 percent less dense than the sea-level air equipment is rated on, so the same blower moves the same cubic feet per minute while carrying roughly 17 percent less heat.

Sizing is the other half. The 99 percent winter design temperature for Larimer County is around 1 degree. Equipment picked off a rule of thumb rather than a load calculation tends to be oversized for the mild two-thirds of the season and short on capacity for the cold snap, which is the worst of both outcomes.

Two Utilities, Two Rebate Programs

Fort Collins is a municipal electric city. Fort Collins Utilities provides your power, not an investor-owned utility, and its residential HVAC rebates run through Efficiency Works, the joint program of Platte River Power Authority. Natural gas comes from Xcel Energy, and Xcel runs its own separate program.

So a Fort Collins homeowner replacing a system is usually looking at two different applications with two different rule sets. Efficiency Works requires a listed provider, a home at least one year old, and an application within 45 days, with pre-approval needed above $2,500. Xcel’s gas furnace rebate has its own deadline. All of these amounts and dates change, so we check the current programs against your address before we quote rather than promising a number.

The City Rule That Decides Which Heat Pump Can Be Your Main Heat

Fort Collins restricts all-electric primary central heating to ground-source or cold-climate heat pump systems designed to heat at the winter outdoor design temperature. Electric resistance strip heat may serve only as emergency backup or as supplemental heat below 15 degrees.

That rule decides which equipment can legally be a home’s main heat inside city limits, and it rules out a good deal of what gets sold as an electrification upgrade elsewhere. It applies directly to ductless mini-split systems and to heat pump installation and repair, and we check it before specifying either.

The City also removed unvented gas room heaters from its fuel gas code, which effectively bans them here. If you have one, it is not a code-compliant heat source in Fort Collins.

A Complex Fault, Found and Fixed

Some calls are not a single failed part. A homeowner had a combined furnace and air conditioning problem that did not resolve to an obvious component, and the diagnosis took working through the system rather than swapping the usual suspects. Peter, our owner, took the call himself and worked it to a cause.

Stephanie Wagner wrote: “I am very pleased with the professionalism and expertise of HomeGrown. Our furnace/AC was a complex fix. Peter was able to figure it out. The communication was excellent and I appreciate his kindness too.”

Communication through a long diagnosis is deliberate on our part. When a fault takes hours instead of minutes, you should know what we have ruled out and what we are testing next, in plain terms, before anything gets replaced. Read more customer reviews from Northern Colorado homeowners.

Why Fort Collins Homeowners Call Us

• Licensed and insured, City of Fort Collins license H-2799R
• Room-by-room load calculations and Manual S equipment selection, not tonnage by square foot
• Measured commissioning numbers handed to you, not just to the inspector
• Upfront pricing before work starts
• Same-day service seven days a week, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., weekends included
• Ductwork repair and sealing handled in-house, so duct faults do not become somebody else’s problem

Book HVAC Service in Fort Collins

Tell us what the system is doing and how old it is, and we will schedule the visit. Contact Homegrown Heating and Air Conditioning to book HVAC services in Fort Collins.