A homeowner near Sierra Lane in Walnut Creek called in July with a furnace that had quit on them. Summer is an odd time for a furnace to surface as the problem, but this one had been acting up on and off for a while and finally stopped for good. The house had heat-only, no central air at all.
The diagnostic pointed to end of life, not a repair
We ran the diagnostic. The furnace was old, and age was not the only thing wrong with it. Enough other end-of-life signals had stacked on top that putting parts into it would have been money spent on a system already on its way out. I do not push a replacement when a repair holds. This one did not pencil out as a repair.
So I laid out the real choices. They could go like-for-like with another gas furnace, or step up to a heat pump and get heating and cooling on one platform. They went with the heat pump. For this house the Cooper&Hunter PEAK line fit the load and the budget. It runs quiet, the seasonal efficiency is high, and there is no premium-brand markup riding on the price. Sized right, it would give them whole-house cooling they never had before, plus heating that runs more efficiently than the old gas unit.
What went in
- Cooper&Hunter PEAK high-efficiency heat pump, outdoor condenser sized to the load
- Matched indoor air handler set to factory-spec airflow
- New refrigerant linesets, because the old copper was not worth pressure-testing
- Smart thermostat with proper heat-pump staging
- New disconnect box and whip at the condenser
- Surge protection on the high-voltage feed
Return-air sizing got verified at the air handler before we called it done.
The ductwork is what made the cooling actually work
Here is the part that gets skipped on a lot of heat-pump conversions. When a house has only ever had heating, the duct system was never asked to move the airflow a 3-ton cooling load needs. Bolting on a condenser does not change that. So before signing off on the equipment, we measured static pressure and checked the return-air sizing to confirm the ducts could carry the new airflow.
Two duct joints needed sealing. We handled them during the install instead of leaving them to turn into a comfort complaint weeks later when a room would not cool. That is the kind of detail that decides whether the new system feels right or feels half-finished.
The result and the warranty
The homeowner ended up with heating and cooling on one efficient platform, quieter than the furnace it replaced, and lower energy use across the year. Coverage is a 10-year parts and 10-year labor warranty, plus the Cooper&Hunter factory equipment warranty.
The Cooper&Hunter platform also qualifies under utility rebate programs, and those move year to year. We work with BayREN, MCE, PG&E, and EBCE/Ava, plus manufacturer instant rebates. Amounts and funding vary by territory and cycle, so we confirmed what was actually paying when we wrote the estimate.
If your furnace is on its last legs and you are weighing whether a heat pump makes sense for your house, that is exactly the conversation we have on a heat pump installation visit. The same crew runs our HVAC division, Bay Area HVAC Service.
