Emergency HVAC Repair Without the Runaround.
A house at 95 degrees is an emergency. A heater dead in a freeze is an emergency. Water coming through the ceiling from an attic unit is absolutely an emergency. Call (512) 925-3090 right now, tell the tech who answers what the house is doing, and a stocked truck starts moving. The rest of this page can wait until the system is running.
Emergency · Burnet & Central Texas
What Counts, and What Happens Next
People apologize for calling us at night. Stop that. This company was built for the exact moment your system quits at the worst time, and the worst time is when systems quit. Texas heat does not ease up because it is Sunday, and a February ice storm does not care that the calendar says everyone is closed. If your home is unsafe or headed that way, hot, freezing, leaking water, tripping breakers, or smelling like something electrical is cooking, that is an emergency and it gets emergency handling.
Here is what emergency handling means in practice. The phone gets answered by a tech, not a service. That tech asks pointed questions: what is the system doing, what did it do last, what is the temperature inside, who is in the house. Those answers decide two things, how fast you need us and what goes on the truck. A no-cool call with an elderly parent in the house outranks everything. A system that is limping but alive might get talked through a safe workaround on the phone, free, until the truck arrives.
What you should do while we drive: if you smell burning or see breaker trips, kill the system at the thermostat and the panel. If water is dripping from a ceiling register or the drain pan, shut the system down and catch the drip. If the AC froze into a block of ice, leave the fan running with cooling off so the coil thaws before we arrive. Every one of those moves shortens the repair.
There is also a Hill Country layer to this work that out-of-area advice never accounts for. Limestone terrain around Burnet soaks up heat all day and radiates it back through the evening, so equipment here runs longer and later than the same unit would in a milder market. Humidity rolling off Buchanan, LBJ, and the rest of the Highland Lakes chain works on coils, drain lines, and cabinet steel every month of the year. Then winter shows up sideways: a sixty-degree afternoon collapsing into an overnight freeze finds every marginal component in the county at once. Doing emergency repair correctly here means doing it for this climate, with parts choices and settings that respect what Central Texas actually does to machinery.
Emergency
The Emergencies We See Most
Ten years of after-hours calls around the Highland Lakes settle into a familiar list. Odds are your bad night is on it, and the truck is stocked accordingly.
- Dead AC in a heat waveUsually a failed capacitor, contactor, or fan motor. All three ride on the truck, which is why most July emergency calls end with cold air the same visit.
- No heat in a freezeHeat pumps stuck in defrost, tripped float switches, failed boards. We restore heat fast and safely, and we check the backup strips while we are in there.
- Water where it should not beA clogged condensate drain overflows into ceilings and closets. We clear the line, treat it, and check the pan and float switch that should have stopped it.
- Ice on the systemA frozen coil means airflow or refrigerant trouble. We thaw it, find which one caused it, and fix the cause instead of just melting the symptom.
- Electrical smells and tripsBurning smells and breakers that will not hold are stop-now problems. Shut it down, call, and let us find the short before it finds the insulation.
- Commercial down, product at riskA dead walk-in or a server room heating up is money on a timer. Commercial emergencies get the same night line and the same priority math.
Skip the reading, make the call.
Two minutes on the phone with a real tech beats an hour of internet research. Describe the symptom in your own words and get a straight answer about cause, timing, and cost.
Why Off Duty
Why the 2 AM Call Works Here
Most shops bolt an answering service onto a nine-to-five business and call it emergency service. The service takes a message, the message waits for morning, and your kitchen hits 90 before anyone calls back. Off Duty runs the other direction. The after-hours line rings a working tech, usually Bryce himself, and the emergency truck is stocked before it is needed: capacitors, contactors, universal fan motors, control boards, refrigerant, drain tools. Stocking decisions come from ten years of knowing exactly what fails around here and when.
The July 2025 flood taught Burnet what emergencies really look like, and this company was in the middle of the recovery, replacing a flooded family’s system alongside Samaritan’s Purse. That is the mindset your midnight call gets: not an inconvenience, the actual job. The name on the truck is a promise about exactly this moment.
Every emergency repair call runs the same four steps we run on everything. You call (512) 925-3090 and a real person answers, any hour of any day. We diagnose with gauges and meters, never with guesses, until the actual cause is proven. Then we explain it straight: the failure, the fix, and the exact price, in plain English, before any work starts. Finally we do the work to spec and verify it under load before the truck leaves. Temperatures checked, pressures checked, paperwork handled. It is the same process that earned the reviews on our reviews page, and it does not change based on the size of the job.
On pricing, the policy is the same as everything else here: out loud and up front. The visit cost gets stated on the phone before anyone drives anywhere. The repair price gets stated after diagnosis and before work. No packages with hidden contents, no commission-driven upsell in the truck, and no number on the invoice you did not already hear.
One honest note about timing. Problems in this category rarely improve on their own, and the price of waiting is usually a bigger bill: the weak part takes a healthy one with it, the small leak becomes a stain on a ceiling, the strange noise becomes a seized motor. Calling early is almost always the cheaper version of the same repair, and the phone consult costs nothing: describe what you are seeing and we will tell you honestly whether it can wait.
You will also know exactly who is in your house. This company runs on one standard because it mostly runs on one set of hands: Bryce, second-generation in the trade, with every credential on the about page and every kind of job photographed in the gallery. Small shop, short chain of accountability, no strangers in rotation.
This service runs wherever our trucks do: home base in Burnet, the Highland Lakes from Granite Shoals to Buchanan Dam, down the corridor to Round Rock and Austin, north to Killeen and Temple, and out to the sixteen-county edge at Waco, Boerne, and Fredericksburg. The whole map lives on the service areas page, with drive-time honesty built into every window we quote.
Diamond Contractor
Mitsubishi’s top ductless credential, earned with factory training.
Second Generation
Raised in the trade, ten years on the tools before the name went on a truck.
Warranty Authorized
JB and Mitsubishi warranty work: we file the claim, you skip the fight.
Open 24 Hours
A real person answers the phone at any hour, every day of the year.
The Standard
How This Work Gets Done Here
A job like this is a chain of small decisions nobody watches: which part, which setting, which clearance, which step gets skipped when the attic hits 130 degrees. Our answer to all of them is the same. Do it the way the book says, the way the second generation was taught, the way you would want it done if the address were your own. That means proven diagnosis before parts, correct materials over convenient ones, and procedure followed all the way through the parts of the job that never show.
It also means finishing properly. The system gets verified under working load, the readings get documented, the old components get shown on request, and you get an explanation in plain English rather than trade jargon. The price never moves between the quote and the invoice. If anything about the work ever needs a second look, the phone number on your receipt rings the person who did it. Simple system, kept promises, reviewed in public by the people it was kept to.
Emergency HVAC Repair Questions
Asked Before We Roll a Truck
Real questions from real Central Texas customers, answered the same way we answer them on the phone: straight.
Do you really answer at 2 AM?
Yes, and not with a recording. The line rings the on-call tech directly, every night, every weekend, every holiday. You describe the problem, you get an honest arrival window, and the truck rolls. Most nights the person answering is the owner. If several emergencies land at once, the sickest house goes first and everyone gets a truthful timeline instead of a comfortable lie. That is the whole system, and it has held up through heat waves, ice storms, and one very bad flood.
What does an emergency visit cost?
You hear the number on the phone before the truck moves, so the decision is yours with the price in hand. No secret after-hours multiplier appears on the invoice later. Once we diagnose, the repair price gets stated before the work starts, same as a Tuesday afternoon call. Fair pricing is in every review this company has, and emergency calls are where that reputation gets tested hardest, so we guard it hardest there.
Can you actually fix it at night, or just look at it?
Most of the time we fix it that visit. The truck carries the parts that cause the majority of emergency failures: capacitors, contactors, fan motors, boards, fuses, drain equipment, refrigerant. If your failure needs a part nobody stocks at midnight, we say so straight, get the system safe, do what temporary good we can, and lock in the return trip before we leave. You will never be left wondering what happens next.
Should I try anything before you arrive?
A few safe moves help. Check the breaker once, and if it trips again leave it off. Check the thermostat batteries and settings, because a dead thermostat mimics a dead system. If ice is on the lines, run fan-only so the coil thaws. If water is dripping, shut the system off. Never open a refrigerant circuit or poke inside panels with power on. Tell the tech what you tried when you call, it all speeds up the diagnosis.
Do you handle commercial emergencies too?
Yes, and with the urgency the dollars deserve. A restaurant with a dead kitchen system, a shop losing cooling on a summer Saturday, a walk-in cooler full of product warming up, all of it gets the same 24-hour line and the same triage. We serve commercial customers across the corridor from Burnet to Georgetown to Killeen, and our preventative agreements exist mostly to keep those buildings off the emergency board in the first place.
Related work: 24 Hour HVAC Repair · AC Repair · Heat Pump Repair · see real jobs in the gallery
If It Cannot Wait, Stop Reading
The line is answered right now, whatever time it is. Describe the symptom, get a window, get a stocked truck. Prefer to write it out? Send the form and we call you back.
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