Emergency Service in Baltimore, MD

Emergency HVAC Service Across the Greater Baltimore Metro

Not every failure is an emergency, and we would rather tell you honestly on the phone that something can safely wait until morning than charge an after-hours premium for a problem that will not get worse overnight. Some situations genuinely cannot wait, though — and a few are not an HVAC call at all.

We serve Baltimore City and Baltimore, Anne Arundel, Harford, and Howard counties. Request service.

Call 911 or the utility first — not us

Carbon monoxide. If a CO alarm sounds, or if several people in the house have headaches, dizziness, or nausea that improve when they go outside, get everyone out and call 911 or the gas utility. Do not go back in to investigate, open windows, or wait to see whether the alarm resets. CO is colourless and odourless and the symptoms are easily mistaken for flu. Emergency services and the utility are equipped to measure it; we come afterwards to find and fix the cause.

Gas odour. Leave the building before calling. Do not operate light switches, appliances, or phones inside. Call the gas utility's emergency line from outside.

If your home does not have working CO alarms on every level, that is worth correcting this week regardless of the age of your equipment.

Call us right away

• Burning smell, sparking, or a breaker that trips repeatedly. Shut the system off at the disconnect or breaker and leave it off. A breaker that trips repeatedly is doing its job — resetting it again is how an electrical fault becomes a fire.
• Active water from a condensate overflow or a hydronic leak, particularly near electrical equipment or above a finished ceiling. Shut off water to the appliance if you can do so safely.
• No heat during a hard freeze. This is where an equipment problem becomes a plumbing and restoration problem — frozen and burst pipes cost far more than the repair.
• No cooling during a heat wave where anyone in the household is an infant, an older adult, or has a cardiovascular or respiratory condition. Say so when you call; it changes how we triage.
• A tank water heater leaking from the body. Shut off the supply and the gas or breaker.

Usually safe until the next available appointment

A system that is cooling or heating but not as well as it should. One room uncomfortable while the rest of the house is fine. A new noise that is not accompanied by burning smell or repeated breaker trips. A condensate float switch that has shut the system down — annoying, but it did exactly what it was designed to do. Higher-than-expected bills.

These are real problems worth fixing. They are not usually worth an after-hours premium, and we will say so.

What to check before you call

A meaningful share of after-hours calls resolve in two minutes, and there is no embarrassment in checking:

• Thermostat — correct mode, setpoint actually calling, batteries not dead.
• Breaker — tripped? Reset it once. If it trips again, stop and call.
• Service switch at the furnace or air handler, and the disconnect at the outdoor unit. These look like light switches and get turned off during other work.
• Filter — a fully loaded filter can shut a system down on a safety limit.
• Condensate pan and float switch — a full pan will intentionally stop the system.
• Furnace door panel — many units will not run with it off or seated incorrectly.
• Oil systems — press the reset once only. Repeated resets make the job bigger.

Protecting the house while you wait

In a winter outage: keep interior doors open to circulate what warmth remains, open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls, let a faucet drip if a hard freeze is forecast, and close off unused rooms. Do not use an oven, a gas range, or an unvented combustion heater to heat living space — that is a leading cause of CO poisoning during outages.

In a summer outage: close blinds on the sun side, move to the lowest level, run fans, stay hydrated. If indoor temperature is climbing and someone in the household is vulnerable, relocate rather than wait it out.

What to have ready when you call

What the system is doing and when it started; whether anything changed just before (a power outage, a storm, other work in the house); what you have already checked; equipment type and rough age, with a model number if you can reach the data plate safely; who is in the household; and how to access the equipment. If you are calling about a safety item, lead with that — it changes both the response and what we tell you to do while you wait.

Related services

Our guide to emergency HVAC triage goes into more detail. Most emergency calls trace back to something a seasonal visit would have caught — see seasonal tune-ups and the Green Guardian Club, which exists to keep you off this page.