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Polar Express HVAC & Refrigeration

Commercial HVAC

The heat side of the rooftop unit, tested before the building needs it.

Polar Express provides commercial heating repair across the San Antonio metro, with 24/7 emergency dispatch and same-day service on most repair calls. One flat-rate price is approved in writing before work begins for business rooftop ignition, combustion, draft, airflow, and safety work. TDLR license TACLA00127982C.

Commercial heating failures get discovered on the first cold morning by a building full of people, because nobody fired the units back in October.

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  • Licensed TACLA00127982C
  • Since 2023
  • 4.9 Google rating

24/7 emergency dispatch

Call now. A person answers.

Any hour, any day of the year, including holidays. Tell us what the equipment is reading and we will tell you what to do with the product while a technician is on the way.

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Flat-rate price approved before any work starts, on emergency calls the same as on scheduled ones.

Commercial heating in San Antonio has one characteristic problem: nobody finds out whether it works until the morning it is needed. The packaged units on the roof spend nine or ten months cooling, the heat section inside each cabinet sits untouched, and the first front of the season lands on a weekday with the building already full of people. Polar Express services the heating side of commercial equipment across the metro, on packaged rooftop units, commercial split systems with gas or electric heat, and the heat pumps serving smaller suites, for offices, retail spaces, restaurants, churches, and light industrial buildings that mostly inherited whatever the previous tenant left up there. The same crew handles the refrigeration inside the building, so a restaurant with a cold dining room and a walk-in acting up is one phone call rather than two vendors and a scheduling problem.

What we handle

Commercial Heating covers more than one failure.

The complaint that gets called in is rarely the whole job. These are the things a technician is actually looking at on this equipment.

  • Rooftop unit heat sections

    Gas heat exchangers, burners, and induced draft assemblies inside packaged units, along with the unit controls and economizer that decide when any of it is allowed to run.

  • Burners, igniters, and gas trains

    Ignition controls, gas valves, pressure switches, rollout and limit safeties, and the flame sensing that stops a heat section the moment proof of flame is lost.

  • Electric heat sections and contactors

    Elements, sequencers, high-amperage contactors, and the electrical terminations that carry commercial strip heat and quietly fail at the connection rather than the element.

  • Venting, draft, and combustion air

    Flue integrity, induced draft operation, and the combustion air path on equipment that has been weathering on a flat roof for a decade or more.

  • Fall changeover and scheduled checks

    Every heat section run under load in October, before the building needs it, with the findings written up for whoever manages the property.

  • After-hours commercial dispatch

    A cold building on a Saturday reaches the same around-the-clock line the refrigeration side runs on, every day of the year including holidays.

Signs and causes

What you are seeing, and what usually causes it.

Read these before you call. Knowing which one matches gets the right parts on the truck, and a couple of them are worth acting on in the next ten minutes.

  • The first cold morning is when you find out

    Heat sections that have not fired since last winter fail on the day they are first asked to work, which is also the day the building is occupied and the phone starts ringing. A fall changeover check exists precisely to move that discovery to a quiet Tuesday in October.

  • One suite is cold while the rest of the floor is fine

    A single zone that will not warm usually points at a zone damper, a failed controller, a heat section locked out on one unit, or a rooftop unit covering more square footage than it was ever selected for. Turning the whole building up to satisfy one suite is an expensive way to not solve it.

  • The heat runs, then trips out mid-morning

    A heat section that satisfies early and then locks out is usually hitting a safety: restricted airflow through a filter bank nobody changed, an induced draft fault, or a limit tripping as outdoor conditions and occupancy load shift through the day.

  • The dining room never recovers once service starts

    Restaurants fight door traffic, kitchen exhaust, and makeup air all at once, and a heat section sized for an empty building will not win that fight alone. It is usually an air balance and makeup air problem rather than broken equipment, and it deserves to be diagnosed as one.

  • There is a combustion smell in occupied space

    Any smell of combustion reaching a floor full of people is a stop-and-inspect situation rather than a work order for next week. Rooftop heat sections vent above the building, so an odor arriving downstairs means the flue, the heat exchanger, or an outside air intake is not doing what it should.

What it costs

You approve the price before the work starts.

Commercial heating gets quoted per unit and per fault, because a flame sensor on a rooftop unit and a heat exchanger inside one are not the same conversation in any respect. A technician diagnoses the equipment, explains what failed and what it means for the people under it, and hands you a flat-rate figure to approve before the repair starts. For property managers we will also put the roof inventory and a fall changeover schedule in writing, so heating stops being an annual surprise and turns into a line somebody can budget for. When a heat section is genuinely finished, we say so and show you the comparison rather than selling one more repair into it.

Request a quote

What moves the number

  • Equipment type and tonnage, and whether the heat is gas or electric
  • Roof access, including whether a lift or a second technician is needed to get parts up
  • Which side failed, since a heat exchanger and an igniter share nothing but a cabinet
  • How many units are on the building and whether they can be covered in a single trip
  • Whether the work happens during business hours or after the building empties
  • Whether the site carries a maintenance agreement with a defined repair rate

How the job runs

What happens between your call and a working system.

  1. Step 1

    Fire everything before the season, not during it

    A changeover visit runs every heat section under load in mild weather, which is the only way to find a failure while it is still a scheduling question. That one visit prevents most of the emergency calls this trade takes in December.

  2. Step 2

    Diagnose on the roof, report on the ground

    Ignition sequence, gas pressure, temperature rise, draft, safeties, and airflow, with the findings written for whoever signs the invoice rather than left in a technician's notebook.

  3. Step 3

    Flat rate, approved, then repaired

    One number for the fix before anything gets opened. Igniters, flame sensors, contactors, sequencers, and common boards ride with the technician, and heavier parts come with a written timeline instead of a shrug.

  4. Step 4

    Work around the building, not through it

    Anything that can wait for a closed building gets done in a closed building. Where it cannot, the disruption is planned so it lands on the hour that costs the tenants the least.

Questions

Straight answers, before you call.

Still not covered here? The person who answers the phone can usually settle it in a sentence, day or night.

Call (210) 376-0781

Yes, and a packaged rooftop unit carries its heat section in the same cabinet as the cooling equipment, so both halves are one visit rather than two vendors. Polar Express services rooftop heating across every major manufacturer, including units that came with the building and have no paperwork left. That covers gas heat exchangers, burners and ignition controls, gas trains and safeties, induced draft assemblies, electric heat sections and sequencers, and the unit controls and economizer that decide when heating is allowed to run.

October, ahead of the first front, and it should be a load test rather than a walkthrough. Running each heat section until it satisfies is the only way to catch a failed igniter, a compromised exchanger, or a locked-out safety while the building is still comfortable and the repair can be scheduled. Commercial equipment that sits idle through a long cooling season fails at startup far more often than it fails in service.

Heat exchanger condition, flue and induced draft operation, combustion air, gas pressure at the manifold, the rollout and limit safeties, and a carbon monoxide reading taken with the burners firing. On occupied commercial space that inspection carries more weight than it does in a house. The number of people downstream of a bad heat exchanger is far larger, and none of them can tell that anything is wrong.

Almost always a zone problem rather than a plant problem: a stuck or failed damper, a dead zone controller, thermostat wiring, or one rooftop unit locked out while its neighbors keep running normally. Occasionally it is a design issue, where a single unit was asked to cover more area than it was selected for after a build-out. The diagnosis starts at that zone rather than at the whole system.

We diagnose it, tell you plainly whether it is a part or the end of that unit, and quote the repair at a flat rate before starting. When the equipment cannot be safely returned to service and a replacement will not land that week, we help you plan around the building instead. That means which spaces can be consolidated, what temporary heat is realistic in that shell, and what the timeline for the permanent fix genuinely looks like.

Polar Express provides one written flat-rate price for commercial heating repair in San Antonio, approved before work begins. The total depends on equipment type and capacity, roof access, and whether the failed component is an igniter, control, electric heat section, inducer, or heat exchanger. The building manager receives the diagnosis and scope before authorizing the repair.

Polar Express offers same-day service on most commercial heating repair calls across San Antonio and runs 24/7 emergency dispatch on nights, weekends, and holidays. The person answering the phone provides a real arrival window based on the active route, occupied conditions, weather demand, and whether a combustion concern changes the priority.

Related services

The work that usually comes with this one.

Nearby

We run this service across the San Antonio metro. These are three of the areas we cover, and the full list lives on the service areas page.

One call, day or night.

Licensed, locally owned, and answering the phone around the clock. You get the diagnosis in plain language and the price before the work starts.

Call 24/7 · (210) 376-0781Book Service