COMMERCIAL AC SERVICE & INSTALL IN SALT LAKE CITY

Commercial HVAC isn't residential work scaled up. The equipment is different (rooftop package units, split systems up to 25 tons, VRF multi-zone, commercial chillers), the access is different (rooftop with safety requirements), the refrigerants can be different (larger charges, sometimes legacy systems on R-22 or R-407C), and the consequences of downtime are different. When a residential AC fails on a 95° Saturday, the family is uncomfortable. When a restaurant's RTU fails at noon on a 95° Saturday, they're losing revenue by the hour and risking health-department issues with food storage. We run our commercial work with that understanding.

Valley serves commercial HVAC across five Utah counties — Salt Lake, Utah, Davis, Weber, and Tooele. Our commercial clients include restaurants and QSRs, retail strip centers, medical offices, dental practices, assisted living facilities, manufacturing and light industrial, property management groups, HOAs, and small-to-mid office buildings. We don't do heavy industrial or large central plant work — different trade specialty — but everything up to roughly 50 tons total building load is in our wheelhouse.

Commercial services we handle

• RTU (rooftop unit) service and replacement — 3-ton through 25-ton package units. The workhorse of Utah commercial HVAC. Service, repair, and like-for-like replacement with crane lift as needed
• Commercial split system service — condensers on the roof or side yard, air handlers inside. Common in offices, retail, medical
• VRF multi-zone systems — Mitsubishi City Multi, Daikin VRV. Dozens of indoor zones on a few outdoor condensers. Specialized install and service
• Preventive maintenance contracts — quarterly or bi-annual service on commercial equipment. Uptime math almost always favors contract pricing over break-fix
• 24/7 emergency commercial dispatch — restaurants, assisted living, medical, data-adjacent — priority response
• Make-up air units — restaurant kitchens, manufacturing — the supply air systems most commercial techs ignore
• Light commercial controls and BAS integration — thermostats, setback schedules, basic building automation

What commercial maintenance actually catches

Quarterly RTU service on a Salt Lake Valley restaurant routinely catches: belt wear before it snaps, condenser coils clogged with grease and cottonwood (restaurants are brutal on outdoor coils), condensate drains backed up with grease aerosol, control board issues on economizers, refrigerant slow leaks at high-vibration compressor fittings, and make-up air imbalance that's pulling the dining room into negative pressure. Every one of those becomes a $2,500–$8,000 emergency call if not caught. Preventive maintenance contracts turn most of those into $75–$285 scheduled repairs.

Pricing on commercial work

Commercial pricing is flat-rate per job, not hourly, for anything we've done before — same as residential. Service call is $145–$225 (waived if we do the repair). Standard RTU filter + belt + coil check runs $285–$485 per unit. Full quarterly maintenance contracts are priced per-unit annually and usually land $600–$1,200 per RTU per year depending on size and access. Replacement pricing is per-unit quoted after a site assessment — we don't bid blind from a square-footage number.

What Valley does differently

We run our commercial work with the same trucks and techs that handle our high-end residential — no separate "commercial division" with lower-skilled crews. Every commercial call gets a full diagnostic with real instrument readings, not a "yep, needs a new unit" eyeball assessment. Permits get pulled on every install. For contract customers, we maintain equipment history — when the economizer linkage on RTU #4 failed last year, we know that. Proactive maintenance gets done, not just the reactive repair.

For emergencies, commercial gets priority dispatch. Restaurants in the middle of service, assisted living with resident health concerns, medical offices — those don't get put in the residential queue. We scale commercial response with our summer rotation so a restaurant at noon doesn't wait behind four residential tune-ups.

What we don't do

We don't install large central chilled-water plants (not our trade specialty — we'll refer to a good mechanical contractor). We don't work on large industrial ammonia refrigeration. We don't install or service gas-fired absorption chillers. Most light commercial and mid-size commercial work is in scope; if your project is beyond that, we'll be upfront and point you to the right shop.