HVAC and Insulation From a Working Tech
Dana Sorensen · July 2, 2026
The first cold snap of the season is when my phone starts ringing with the same story on repeat: someone bought a shiny new smart thermostat, wired it in themselves, and now the display just blinks and dies. Nine times out of ten, I know the answer before I’ve even parked in the driveway. It’s … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 2, 2026
No spec sheet, no installation manual, and no code book will ever spell this out for you: an alarm can be fully compliant and still fail your family completely, purely because of where it happened to get mounted. I relearned that the hard way last spring on a call where a homeowner woke to her … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 1, 2026
Forty percent output — that’s what my handheld light meter registered when I aimed it into the optical chamber of a hallway smoke detector I’d just pulled down off its bracket. I was at a house in the suburbs on what should’ve been a routine ductwork check, up in the attic, when the homeowner mentioned … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 1, 2026
Almost every homeowner pictures coil cleaning as a wash-down job — more water pressure, cleaner coil, simple as that. It’s the same logic you’d use on a dirty driveway, and it’s flat-out wrong when it comes to those paper-thin aluminum fins. I learned this the hard way as a second-year apprentice, full of confidence I … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 1, 2026
My own basement gave me the answer before any client ever did. Two summers ago I went down to grab a box of old invoices and stopped cold on the third step — the air down there had that heavy, wet-wool quality you can practically chew. I’d tucked a portable unit in the corner months … Read more
Dana Sorensen · July 1, 2026
Stop assuming your bath fan is doing its job just because it hums along and clears the mirror fog. That assumption is exactly what led me into a client’s attic last February, where a routine insulation check turned into something far worse. Six feet of roof sheathing above the master bath was covered in thick, … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
There’s a photo still sitting in my phone’s camera roll that I pull up every time a homeowner insists their carbon monoxide detector “would have caught it.” It’s a cracked brass fitting on a gas line tucked behind a water heater, my combustible gas analyzer’s readout glowing right next to it, and — just out … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
“It’s running fine,” the homeowner kept insisting, arms crossed, watching me check her thermostat display in her Phoenix living room last summer. It read 74°F. Sure enough, the AC had been cycling all morning like clockwork. Yet the air in that room felt like a locker room after a workout — thick, clingy, wrong. She’d … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 30, 2026
Bare copper — that’s what greeted me on the last four feet of suction line before the wall penetration, on a mini split system that was barely 14 months old. The Draper homeowner who owned it had paid a handyman, not a licensed HVAC tech, to hang an 18,000 BTU ductless unit in his master … Read more
Dana Sorensen · June 29, 2026
Here’s the myth I spent years reinforcing without meaning to: that a portable air purifier is basically a placebo if your HVAC system already has decent filtration. I told clients this constantly. Then my own sinuses forced me to check my own advice against reality. Last spring I ran a controlled 30-day trial in my … Read more