Mechanical services · West Midlands · since 2006
We publish the response time.
Everyone else publishes a phone number. Planned maintenance and reactive cover on commercial air conditioning, ventilation, refrigeration and heating. Fourteen engineers, 4,100 assets under contract, and a written attendance window for every priority level — on this page, before you ring us.
The response matrix
What “24-hour callout” actually means here
Three promises, not one. Answer is a human on the phone. Attend is an engineer on your site. Rectify is the fault cleared or contained. Every contract states all three, and the clock runs from your call, not from when we open the ticket.
Critical
Urgent
Routine
If we miss it, you are credited. A missed P1 attendance credits 10% of that quarter's contract charge to your account automatically — we raise it, you do not have to claim it. Out-of-hours attendance carries a 35% uplift Monday to Friday 17:00–08:00 and 50% at weekends and bank holidays; those figures are on the rate card in your contract and on this website.
Plant we hold competence on
Six disciplines, one asset register
Most sites we take on are running four of these at once and being maintained by three different contractors. One register, one visit schedule and one number is usually cheaper before it is easier.
VRF, VRV and splits
Daikin, Mitsubishi Electric, Toshiba, Fujitsu and LG. Cassettes, ducted, wall and floor units, branch controllers and heat-recovery boxes. Leak checking to charge, superheat and subcooling recorded on every visit.
Chillers and close control
Air-cooled packaged chillers to 800 kW, dry air coolers, CRAC units and server-room cooling. Glycol strength, approach temperature and run hours logged and trended, not just ticked.
Ventilation and AHUs
Air handling units, heat-recovery ventilation, extract systems and kitchen canopies. Belts, bearings, dampers and actuators, filters to ISO 16890 grades, and TR19 grease cleaning with before-and-after photographic evidence.
Commercial heating
LTHW plant, commercial boilers, pressurisation units, expansion vessels, pumps and strainers. Gas work under Gas Safe registration 219476; combustion analysis on every service.
Controls and BMS
Trend, Tridium and BACnet or Modbus systems. Setpoint and deadband review, time schedules, sensor calibration and actuator stroke. Most of the energy we save a site is saved here, not by replacing plant.
Commercial refrigeration
Cold rooms, blast chillers, cellar cooling and display cabinets. Temperature logging to your own HACCP records, and a door-seal and defrost regime that stops most callouts before they start.
Contract tiers
Priced per asset, per year
Not per site and not per visit, because the only thing that actually drives our cost is how many units are on your register and how hard they are to reach. Figures below are per asset per year excluding VAT, for a typical wall or cassette split within 45 minutes of Tyseley. Larger plant is quoted on survey; the rate card does not change.
Compliance
Planned
Full cover
Twelve-month term, thirty days' notice after the first six months, and no automatic uplift on renewal without eight weeks' written notice of the figure. Contract inflation across this sector is running at 3.5–5% a year; ours was 3.9% in April 2026 and every customer was told the number before they were invoiced it.
Statutory duties
What this contract discharges — and what stays yours
Most of the penalties in this trade land on the building owner or the responsible person, not on the contractor. So here is the split in writing. If another contractor has told you they take care of all of it, ask them which regulation says so.
Ours, under the contract
- F-Gas leak checking and records At your system's statutory interval — 12-monthly from 5 tonnes CO₂e, 6-monthly from 50, quarterly above 500, halved again if fixed leak detection is fitted. We hold the records and give you a copy the same week.
- The planned task set Written to the SFG20 schedule for each asset class, so what we are meant to do on a visit is a published standard rather than our own word for it.
- Engineer competence Every engineer holds F-Gas Category I; gas work is carried out under Gas Safe registration 219476; grease-extract cleaning is signed off by a BESA Grease Hygiene Technician.
- Refrigerant handling Recovery, reclaim and disposal through a licensed route, with the transfer note filed against the asset. We do not vent, and we do not top up a known leak twice.
Yours, as the building owner
- The TM44 inspection Legally required every five years for any building with air conditioning rated 12 kW or more — including several small units that only add up to 12 kW, which is the part most people miss. £300 penalty, plus £200 for failing to produce the report within seven days. We will arrange and book it. The duty is still yours.
- The fire risk assessment TR19 grease cleaning feeds your assessment under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005; making the assessment suitable and sufficient is the responsible person's duty. Our certificate is evidence for it, not a substitute.
- Keeping the records five years F-Gas equipment records must be retained for five years and produced to the Environment Agency on request, with civil penalties up to £200,000 per offence. We keep copies for ten and will send the file on a day's notice — but the obligation to hold them sits with the operator.
- Access and plant changes Safe access to roofs and plant rooms, and telling us when a unit is added, moved or decommissioned. An asset register is only worth anything if it is true.
The maintenance round
Your year, before it happens
Cooling fails in the first warm week of the year because it has sat idle since September, and heating fails in the first cold snap. Both are predictable, so we schedule against them rather than against the anniversary of your signature.
Heating under load
Boilers, LTHW pumps, pressurisation and expansion. Combustion analysis while the plant is actually working, which is the only time the reading means anything.
Cooling, before you need it
The big visit. Coil cleans, filters, condensate, refrigerant charge and controls. Booked from March so it lands before the first warm week rather than during it.
Peak, and reactive
Light planned load and heavy reactive cover. Mid-season filter change on kitchen and high-dust sites, and condenser washes where the pollen count has done its worst.
Changeover and the report
Heating changeover, F-Gas anniversary checks, and the annual condition report — with a costed list of what will need doing next year, in time for you to put it in a budget.
On site · Digbeth, Birmingham
Thirty-eight fan coils and no register
A 1974 office block off Floodgate Street, six tenants, two air-cooled chillers and thirty-eight fan coil units. The managing agent had inherited it with no asset list, no F-Gas records and three different contractors billing for overlapping work. Two of the units had been dead long enough that nobody could say when they had last run.
We surveyed it over four days, tagged every asset, and found the estate was 11% smaller than the invoices had been assuming. The first year came in under the previous spend with two more visits in it, and the leak that had been topped up twice in eighteen months turned out to be a failed schrader on a branch controller — a £40 part.
What a visit looks like
Plant, not stock photography of an office
The people who attend
Fourteen engineers, and you get the same two
Sites are allocated to a named lead and a named second, so the person walking into your plant room has been in it before. It is the cheapest thing we do and it is worth more than a lower hourly rate.
Ray Aldridge
Director. Started as an apprentice on supermarket packs in 1995 and has never worked anywhere with a call centre.
- F-Gas Cat I · 31 years
Neena Chowdhury
Director, contracts and compliance. Writes the schedules, audits the records, and is the reason the response matrix exists.
- IOSH · BESA · 24 years
Marcus Bill
Lead engineer, VRF and chillers. Holds the Digbeth, Aston and Solihull rounds and knows which roofs need two people.
- F-Gas Cat I · Gas Safe 219476
Tomasz Wisniewski
Controls and BMS. Recovered 19% of one customer's cooling spend by fixing time schedules nobody had opened since 2011.
- Trend · Tridium · BACnet
The straight answer
No, your R410A system does not need replacing yet
Since 1 January 2026 virgin R410A cannot be used to service systems, and R410A is finished for newly manufactured VRF. Every contractor in Britain now has a legitimate-sounding reason to recommend a replacement, and you have no way to tell that from an upsell. So here is our position in writing.
Existing R410A plant can still be topped up with reclaimed and recycled gas, and we hold it. A healthy system with no leak history does not need touching. What changes is the economics of a system that leaks: reclaimed R410A is scarce and rising, so the second repair on a chronic leak is usually the moment replacement starts to pay — not the calendar date, and not the fact that R32 exists.
What we will not do is quote you a changeover on a system we have not leak-tested. And when we do recommend one, the condition report will show you the run hours, the charge history and the two years of top-up records that led us there. If that evidence is not in front of you, you are being sold to.
Before you ring
The questions we actually get asked
We are mid-contract with someone else. How hard is switching?
Not very, and it is usually done at renewal rather than by breaking a term. Send us your current schedule and your last two invoices; we will survey free, price against your actual register rather than the incumbent's, and tell you plainly if you are already on a fair rate. That has happened four times this year.
Will you work on plant you did not install?
Almost everything we maintain was installed by somebody else. We survey it, tag it, record its condition on day one and tell you what we have inherited — including anything we are not prepared to certify until it has been put right. There is no premium for third-party plant.
What happens if you miss a response time?
A missed P1 attendance credits 10% of that quarter's contract charge to your account, and we raise the credit ourselves rather than waiting to be asked. We missed four last year out of 211 P1 calls; all four were credited, and the reasons are in the quarterly report.
Do we have to commit to a year?
The term is twelve months because the statutory cycle is, but after the first six months you can leave on thirty days' notice. We would rather lose a customer cleanly than hold one to a term they have stopped wanting.
Can you do our TM44 inspection too?
Yes — through an accredited Energy Assessor, with the report lodged on the national register. It is priced separately because it is a separate statutory duty and we would rather you saw the cost than had it hidden in a contract line. Typically £340 to £520 for a single-building estate.
Getting started
A survey, a register, and a number you can budget against
The survey is free and takes half a day on a typical site. You get the asset register and the condition report whether or not you go on to contract with us — they are yours, not a sales document, and they are useful to whoever you do end up using.