Rooftop Unit Replacement, the Off Duty Way.
The RTU replacement is commercial HVAC’s set-piece: the crane scheduled, the old unit flown off, the new one curbed, connected, and commissioned, ideally inside one choreographed morning the business barely notices. Getting there is a planning discipline, and the planning is what this page sells alongside the equipment.
Commercial HVAC · Burnet & Central Texas
The Crane Day, Choreographed
Replacement arrives by verdicts the file documents: units aged through their rooftop decades, failure histories accelerating past repair arithmetic, efficiency generations behind at commercial runtimes, refrigerant obsolescence taxing every remaining service, and the decision run as the business case the repair pages describe, operating dollars, downtime exposure, the crane economics, stated with numbers, and timed where operations choose rather than where failure insists, the planned shoulder-season swap being every way cheaper than the emergency July one, which is the scheduling argument for reading the file’s writing early. The equipment selection reruns the install math fresh, loads recalculated for the space’s current use, the original’s sizing sins corrected rather than copied, efficiency tiers priced at your runtimes, gas-electric against heat pump per the current arithmetic, the replacement being the correction opportunity replacements always are.
The choreography is the operational product: curb assessment leading, existing curbs verified structural and dimensional, adapters engineered for the generational transitions, corrections scoped honestly before any crane books, per the installation page’s doctrine; the crane day itself planned to the hour, street and lot access, lift path, roof protection, the old unit recovered and flown, the new one set, the timing landed in the business’s quietest window, dawn lifts before service being the corridor standard; connections executed at pace, gas, electrical, controls, condensate, the trades sequenced; and commissioning closing the day, staging, economizer, airflow, controls integration, the readings filed, the space conditioned by the afternoon it reopened, the whole event’s success measured by how little the business felt it.
Multi-unit roofs phase their replacements across seasons and budgets, the fleet plan sequencing by condition and criticality, capacity staged so the building never bets everything on one crane day, the portfolio version of the same choreography.
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 RTU replacement correctly here means doing it for this climate, with parts choices and settings that respect what Central Texas actually does to machinery.
Commercial HVAC
Replacement Scope, Planned Through
The crane day’s planning stack, each layer settled before the lift books.
Not sure this is your problem?
Call anyway. We name the likely cause on the phone for free, and if it turns out to be something small you can handle yourself, we say exactly that and save you the visit.
Why Off Duty
Replacement as Correction Opportunity
The swap inherits nothing by default: the original unit’s sizing gets audited against the space’s current reality, tenant changes, equipment loads, use evolution since whenever the last selection happened, oversizing and undersizing both corrected at the moment correction is free; the configuration question reopens per the current arithmetic, heat pump packages increasingly claiming replacements the gas-electric incumbents held, the operating model run fresh; economizer and ventilation packages get specified to current code and current energy sense, the free-cooling hours they harvest pricing into the tier decision; and the controls integration modernizes where the building’s systems justify, the new unit joining whatever automation exists or founding it. The corrected replacement outperforms its predecessor on day one and compounds the difference across its decades, which is the whole return on treating the crane day as engineering rather than exchange.
The closeout founds the next era properly: commissioning documentation as the baseline, warranty registrations filed, the maintenance program proposed with the new unit’s actual schedule, and the roof left better documented than found, per the standing practice, the replacement being day one of the service decade the equipment’s economics assume. The corridor’s businesses that plan their replacements read as case studies for the ones that get planned by failure instead; the file tells both stories; and the scheduling conversation this page invites is the difference between them.
Every RTU replacement 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.
A straight word on money. We do not print teaser prices on this website and we do not do surprise math on invoices. Call, describe the problem, and we will tell you what the visit costs before a truck rolls. When the diagnosis is in, you get the full repair price out loud, before the work starts, and you decide with the real number in front of you.
Worth saying plainly: this is not a problem that ages well. Systems compensate quietly right up until they cannot, and the failure that finally announces itself usually costs more than the one caught early would have. If your gut says something is off, that instinct is worth one free phone call. The worst case is we tell you everything sounds normal, which is a pretty good worst case.
As for who shows up: this is an owner-operated shop, so the tech at your door is usually Bryce himself, a second-generation HVAC man with ten years on the tools, licensed, insured, and photographed doing exactly this kind of work in the job gallery. No commissioned salesman rides along, and nobody at this company earns a bonus for talking you into more than you need.
We run this work all over the map: Burnet and the Highland Lakes first, then the whole hundred-mile circle, Marble Falls, Georgetown, Round Rock, Austin, Killeen, and out to Waco and Boerne. The full sixteen-county roster is on the service areas page. Wherever you sit on it, the same truck standard applies: the same tech, the same instruments, the same price-before-work rule, whether the drive took ten minutes or ninety. Distance changes the arrival window, never the workmanship.
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
Every trade job carries an invisible line item: the standard it was done to. On RTU replacement work, ours reads like this. The diagnosis is proven with instruments, because guessing is expensive and it is your money on the table. The parts that go in are parts we would put in our own house, matched to spec instead of whatever was cheapest on the shelf. The workmanship follows the manufacturer’s book and the Texas code book both, because shortcuts hide for exactly one season and then bill you with interest.
When the work is finished, it gets tested the way it will actually be used: under load, at temperature, with the readings written down. Then the area gets left the way we found it or cleaner, the old parts get shown to you on request, and the invoice matches the number you already heard. If anything acts up afterward, you call the same number and the same person answers. That is the entire warranty conversation most customers ever need, and it is why the reviews keep saying the same three things: honest, fair, showed up.
Rooftop Unit Replacement 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.
How long is our business without heating or cooling during replacement?
Hours, by design: the standard single-unit swap runs dawn lift to afternoon commissioning, the space unconditioned only through the working middle, timed against your trading calendar so doors open on a conditioned floor, and the choreography’s entire point being that gap’s compression, connections sequenced, trades staged, commissioning immediate. Multi-unit buildings phase to keep neighboring capacity carrying throughout, and genuine same-day trading, the restaurant serving lunch under its new unit, is the corridor norm rather than the exception. Extended scopes, curb corrections, duct transitions, get stated in the plan up front, bridge capacity engineered where they stretch the gap, per the standing doctrine of no surprises mid-crane.
Can the new unit use our existing curb and ductwork?
Frequently, through engineering rather than hope: curb adapters mate current equipment to legacy openings as standard practice where the curb itself verifies sound, the assessment settling structure and dimensions before anything books, corrections scoped honestly when verification fails, and the duct transitions sealed to the standard the installation page describes, the supply-return junctions being efficiency’s frontier. Generational footprint changes are routine, the adapter engineering handling them invisibly, and the roof’s other stakeholders, membrane warranties, structural realities, get their coordination per the practice. The existing infrastructure serves where it deserves to; the verification decides; and the crane day proceeds on settled answers.
Should we replace with the same type of unit or consider something different?
The selection reruns fresh per the correction doctrine: like-for-like gas-electric succession remains common and sometimes right, while the reopened questions regularly land elsewhere, heat pump packages winning current operating arithmetic across much of the corridor’s profile per their page, efficiency tiers repricing at your actual runtimes, sizing corrected for the space’s evolved use, economizer packages earning their specification, and the proposal prices the genuine candidates against your numbers rather than defaulting to succession, the replacement moment being exactly when reconsideration is free. The building’s arithmetic picks; the recommendation shows its work; and the crane flies whichever answer the numbers earned.
How much does rooftop unit replacement cost?
Scoped per project and stated in the proposal: equipment tonnage and configuration setting the base, curb and transition scope adding honestly where verification finds needs, crane logistics per the site’s access reality, and the commissioning and closeout documentation included as the scope they are, with the corridor’s single-unit swaps landing in predictable commercial ranges the proposal makes specific, multi-unit programs phased against budgets sensibly. The pricing conversation runs in business-case terms, the replacement against the failing incumbent’s repair trajectory, efficiency delta at your runtimes, downtime exposure, per the verdict discipline, and financing structures serve where they serve, the number arriving with its arithmetic attached, per the house habit.
When is the best time to schedule a replacement?
Shoulder seasons, deliberately: spring and fall offering mild-weather crane days, schedule availability, equipment lead times at their calmest, and the swap landing before the demand season tests the new unit rather than during the emergency that forced it, the planned replacement beating the failure-driven one on every line, price, timing, downtime, decision quality. The file’s writing tells most buildings their timing in advance, aging units flagged seasons ahead per the fleet-walk practice, and the scheduling conversation this page invites is exactly that early read, your unit’s trajectory against the calendar, the crane day chosen rather than imposed, which is the entire difference between the corridor’s two replacement stories.
The Crane Day, Planned to the Hour
Verdict by business case, correction by engineering, and the floor trading by afternoon. Prefer to write it out? Send the form and we call you back.
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