HVAC service across Durham Region
Metropolitan Heating and Air Conditioning covers Durham Region from our shop on Venture Drive in Scarborough, and has since 1979. We work on all makes and models across six service categories, and this page sets out what each one covers and how they relate — because the categories overlap more than the names suggest, and the right starting point is not always obvious.
Call (416) 283-5698, Monday to Friday, 8:00 AM to 4:00 PM.
Heating
Heating covers gas and electric furnaces: repair, annual maintenance, and installation or replacement. A furnace makes heat by burning fuel and transferring it through a heat exchanger into air the blower circulates. Everything that goes wrong with one is either combustion, the safety interlocks that supervise combustion, airflow, or the controls tying them together.
The single most consequential finding in heating is a cracked heat exchanger, because it is the only one that is not a repair.
Cooling
Air conditioning does not make cold. It moves heat out of the house using the vapour-compression cycle: refrigerant boils in the indoor coil absorbing heat, the compressor raises its pressure and temperature, and the outdoor coil rejects that heat outside.
Grasping that one idea explains most cooling faults. Low refrigerant means a leak, because refrigerant is not consumed. A dirty outdoor coil cannot reject heat, so pressures climb and capacity falls. Restricted airflow over the indoor coil drops its temperature until it ices. And because cooling removes moisture as a by-product of run time, a system oversized for the house cools quickly and leaves the air damp.
Heat pumps and ductless: where the categories overlap
A heat pump is an air conditioner with a reversing valve. That valve swaps the roles of the two coils, so the same machine that moved heat out in July moves heat in during winter. There is genuinely no separate heating appliance inside it. That is why a heat pump appears in both our heating and cooling work, and why its maintenance combines both.
Ductless mini-splits are heat pumps without ductwork: an outdoor unit joined to one or more wall-mounted indoor heads by refrigerant lines. They exist for conditioned space that ducts do not serve properly — additions, converted attics and basements, garages, and the one room that has never been comfortable.
Water heaters
Water heaters sit apart from the comfort system but come to the same trades. Tank units store and reheat; tankless units heat on demand and are limited by flow rate rather than volume. Both are dominated by water chemistry — sediment in a tank, scale in a tankless heat exchanger — and both have a component whose failure ends the appliance, which for a tank is the tank itself.
Indoor air quality and controls
Indoor air quality equipment works on the air the system is already moving. Filtration is rated by MERV, which describes the size of particle a filter captures and at what efficiency. Higher MERV means denser media, and denser media adds resistance — which is why filter choice and duct static pressure are one decision, not two.
Humidity is the other half. Ontario winters strip moisture out of indoor air, which is a humidifier's job. Summer is the reverse, and dehumidification depends on the cooling system running long enough to do it. Controls tie the whole thing together: a thermostat that stages equipment properly changes how the system runs far more than most people expect.
Three different conversations
Repair, maintenance and replacement are not points on one scale. Repair is diagnosis-driven and starts from a symptom. Maintenance is measurement-driven and starts from numbers — temperature rise, static pressure, capacitance, superheat — read while everything still works. Replacement is sizing-driven and starts from a heat loss and heat gain calculation for the actual house, not from whatever equipment happens to be there now.
Knowing which conversation you are in saves money. Asking for a quote when what you need is a diagnosis is the most common way households overspend on this equipment.
Booking from anywhere in Durham Region
Call (416) 283-5698 weekdays between 8:00 AM and 4:00 PM. Have the make, model and rough age from the equipment label, what the symptom is, when it started, and any code the controls are displaying.
We are licensed and insured, we work on all makes and models, and we install Carrier, Lennox, Napoleon, Trane, Bosch and Daikin. Financing is available through Vista. See the full list of areas we cover.