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Polar Express HVAC & Refrigeration

24/7 Heating

No heat in a hard freeze? Somebody is on the line.

Polar Express provides emergency heating repair for homes 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 gas, electric, and heat pump failures triaged for safety. TDLR license TACLA00127982C.

Heating calls get triaged before anything else happens. A few end in five minutes, and a few of them should be a call to the gas company instead of to us.

Call 24/7 · (210) 376-0781Book Service
  • Licensed TACLA00127982C
  • Since 2023
  • 4.9 Google rating

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Texas cold does not arrive gradually. A front crosses in an afternoon, the overnight low collapses, and equipment that has been idle all year is asked to carry a house through the coldest night it will see. That is the shape of a San Antonio winter: long mild stretches broken by short sharp freezes, and the February 2021 freeze is still the one everybody in this city measures the others against. Polar Express answers its emergency line around the clock, every day of the year, and heating calls get triaged on the phone before anything else happens. Some of them turn out to be a thermostat with dead batteries or a breaker somebody knocked in the garage, and those end in five minutes with nothing owed. Some of them start with a smell of gas, and in that case the right first call is not to us.

What we handle

Emergency Heating Repair 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.

  • No heat, at any hour

    Nights, weekends, and holidays, on gas furnaces, electric heat, and heat pumps. A person answers the line rather than a menu with a callback promise attached to it.

  • A smell of gas near the equipment

    Leave the building with everyone in it, touch no switches on the way out, and call your gas utility or 911 from outside. That call comes before ours, and we will say the same if you reach us first.

  • A carbon monoxide alarm sounding

    Get everyone outside into fresh air and call 911. Once the fire department has cleared the house, we come and find out what the combustion side of the system has been doing.

  • Cold that has become a health problem

    Infants, older adults, and anyone managing a medical condition move up the dispatch order. Say who is in the house in your first sentence, because we cannot prioritize what nobody tells us.

  • Freeze conditions and the rest of the house

    A house without heat during a hard freeze has plumbing to think about as well as comfort, and we will talk through that on the phone whether or not the repair happens tonight.

  • Dead systems, breakers, and lockouts

    A system with no power at all, a breaker that will not stay set, or a furnace that has locked itself out after repeated failed ignition attempts.

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 house is falling and the system will not run

    An indoor temperature dropping steadily overnight with the equipment silent is not going to correct itself before morning. During a freeze that is a call to make immediately, because the queue only grows as the night goes on.

  • A carbon monoxide alarm is going off

    Treat it as real every single time. Get everyone out of the house into fresh air, call 911 from outside, and do not go back in to open windows or hunt for a source. An alarm that sounds and then stops is still a reason to have the system inspected before it runs again.

  • You can smell gas

    Leave immediately with everyone in the building, avoid light switches, garage door openers, and phones until you are outside, and call the gas utility or 911 from a neighbor's yard. A suspected gas leak is not an HVAC call until the utility says the building is safe to be in.

  • The furnace locked out and will not restart

    Modern furnaces stop trying after a set number of failed ignition attempts, which is a deliberate protection rather than a breakdown. Cutting power sometimes clears it for one more run, and if it locks out a second time the fault is real and the resets should stop there.

  • Somebody in the house cannot handle the cold

    Cold is a medical issue before it is a comfort issue for newborns, older adults, and people with circulatory or respiratory conditions. If that describes your household, lead with it on the call, and if anyone is showing signs of hypothermia that is a 911 call rather than a heating call.

What it costs

You approve the price before the work starts.

Overnight and holiday dispatch is priced differently from a weekday appointment, and you hear that on the phone before a truck moves rather than reading it off an invoice afterward. Everything past that point works the way it does on any other job here. The technician finds the fault, explains it, and puts one flat-rate number in front of you to approve before the repair begins. During a hard freeze we will also give you a straight read on where you sit in the queue instead of inventing an arrival time, and when what you are describing can safely wait for daylight, we say so and save you the after-hours rate.

Request a quote

What moves the number

  • The hour and the day, since a freezing night is not billed like a Tuesday morning
  • What failed, and whether that part is riding on the truck at two in the morning
  • Whether the visit ends in a full repair or in getting the house safely warm until suppliers open
  • Access to the equipment, particularly an attic furnace in the middle of a freeze
  • Whether a second system at the same address gets checked on the same trip
  • Any follow-up work agreed once the house is back out of danger

How the job runs

What happens between your call and a working system.

  1. Step 1

    Triage on the phone, safety first

    The opening questions are whether anyone smells gas, whether an alarm has sounded, and who is in the house. Those answers can turn a heating dispatch into a call to the gas utility or to 911, and that redirection is worth more to you than anything we could sell.

  2. Step 2

    The checks worth doing while you wait

    Thermostat batteries and mode, the breaker feeding the furnace or air handler, the switch beside the equipment that looks like a light switch, and the filter. Any of the four can end the call, and we stay on the line while you look.

  3. Step 3

    Dispatch, diagnose, approve, repair

    The truck gets loaded against what you described. Igniters, flame sensors, capacitors, sequencers, and control boards are standard stock, so a large share of freeze-night calls finish without a return trip.

  4. Step 4

    Warm tonight, finished properly later

    When the permanent repair waits on a part no supplier will hand over until morning, you get the honest version of that, plus whatever safely restores heat in the meantime and a return visit on a time you agreed to.

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

No heat during a freeze counts, and it counts more where an infant, an older adult, or anyone with a health condition lives in the house. So does a sounding carbon monoxide alarm, a smell of gas, a burning smell from the equipment, a breaker that will not stay set, and an indoor temperature that keeps falling while the system appears to run. When you are unsure, describe it on the phone, because the triage conversation costs nothing at all.

Leave the building immediately with everyone in it, then call your gas utility or 911 once you are outside and clear of it. Do not flip light switches, unplug anything, use a garage door opener, or make that call from indoors, because any of those can produce a spark. Polar Express is the second call rather than the first, and no heating repair is worth being inside that building for.

There is no single number, because the risk depends far more on who is inside than on what the thermostat reads. Newborns, older adults, and people with certain medical conditions lose ground at indoor temperatures a healthy adult would only find unpleasant, and plumbing in an attic or an exterior wall becomes a concern once outdoor temperatures sit below freezing for a stretch. Treat a cooling house with vulnerable people in it as urgent rather than as a comfort complaint.

Close off rooms nobody is using, gather everyone into one interior room, and layer clothing and blankets instead of trying to heat the whole house. Never use a gas oven, a charcoal or propane grill, or a generator indoors or in a garage for warmth, because that is how carbon monoxide poisonings genuinely happen during freezes. Electric space heaters are fine plugged straight into a wall outlet, kept well clear of bedding, and switched off before anyone sleeps.

The honest answer is that a hard freeze puts every HVAC company in San Antonio into triage, this one included, and calls get ordered by safety rather than by who dialed first. The line is answered around the clock either way, and you get a real read on where you stand instead of a comfortable arrival window nobody can keep. Households with no heat and a vulnerable person in them go to the front of the list.

Polar Express provides one written flat-rate price for emergency heating repair in San Antonio, approved before work begins. The total depends on the failed part, gas, electric, or heat pump equipment, and attic or closet access. After-hours dispatch terms are explained on the phone, and the repair does not run on an hourly meter. The $50 off any repair offer applies, one per household, and cannot combine with other offers.

Polar Express repairs all major heating brands after hours across San Antonio, including gas furnaces, electric furnaces, air handlers, and heat pumps. The emergency visit includes the applicable carbon monoxide and combustion safety check, followed by one written flat-rate price approved before work begins. The technician bases the repair on the failed component and safe operating condition, not the equipment badge.

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