A heat pump company built around one kind of house.
Prime Air Heating & Cooling installs cold-climate heat pumps and ductless mini-splits in the Merrimack Valley and southern New Hampshire, and does nothing else. Most of the houses here are older than the technology by a century: balloon-framed, plaster-walled, heated by a boiler in the basement and cooled, if at all, by window units.
Those houses can be heated and cooled well by heat pumps. It takes a careful calculation, equipment chosen room by room, and installation work treated as finish carpentry rather than an afterthought. That is the whole of what we set out to do.
Why we do only this
Heat pumps have a mixed reputation in older New England houses, and most of it was earned by installation, not by the equipment. A single oversized head in a hallway that never reaches the bedrooms. An outdoor unit set on the ground, buried by the first real storm. Line sets stapled across the front of the house. Condensate lines that freeze in January and back up into the wall.
Each of those is a decision someone made in a hurry. Doing one kind of work lets us slow those decisions down: measure every room, route every line where it belongs, and set up the controls so the system does what the calculation said it would. We would rather install fewer systems and have every one of them working the way it should in its fifth winter.
What we hold to on every job
These are not promises for a brochure. They are how the work is organized, and you can hold us to each of them.
- The calculation is yours
- The room-by-room heat loss calculation comes with the quote, whether or not you hire us. If another contractor is bidding the same job, you can hand it to them.
- Equipment named in writing
- The quote lists the make and model of every indoor and outdoor unit. Nothing is substituted with an “equivalent” without your written approval.
- Permits and inspections
- We pull the electrical and building permits the work requires, schedule the inspections, and give you copies of the sign-offs for your records.
- Exterior work treated as finish work
- Line covers follow corner boards and trim and are painted to match. Nothing runs across the face of the house when a better path exists.
- Refrigerant handled properly
- Every circuit is pressure-tested and evacuated before it is charged. Refrigerant removed from old equipment is recovered, never vented, as federal law requires.
- We will say when not to
- If the house needs air sealing and insulation first, or a room is better left on the existing system, we will tell you, even when it makes the job smaller.
See how we work in your own house
An assessment is the clearest way to judge us. You will see how we measure, what we look at, and what we write down, and you keep the calculation either way.