Heat pumps and mini splits in Columbia

The houses in Columbia

Columbia is one of the two oldest residential districts in the city — small square-plan cottages and one-and-a-half-storey houses built for mill and cannery families, sitting close to the sidewalk on narrow lots. The upper half-storey has knee walls and sloped ceilings that make duct routing genuinely difficult, and most houses have a partial basement with a low header. A number have been carefully restored and a number have not, which changes the load calculation more than the square footage does.

What is probably heating yours right now

Heating in Columbia is a museum of the last hundred years: gravity furnaces converted from coal to oil and then to gas, gas furnaces shoehorned into a basement corner with the old octopus trunk still radiating into the dirt, and upstairs bedrooms heated by a single baseboard because the ducts never made it up there. Detached studios and back units are almost always all-electric. Mixed systems like these are worth an honest look at what the actual rebate path is before anyone orders equipment.

What makes a Columbia install different

The recurring Columbia problem is that the downstairs is on ducts and the upstairs is not, so a whole-house answer often means a ducted heat pump on the existing basement trunk plus one ductless head for the upper floor. Lot lines are tight, and your condenser will sit within a few feet of the neighbour’s bedroom window, so placement and sound rating are a conversation with your neighbour as much as with us. Basement headroom is limited enough that the air handler orientation has to be planned, not improvised, and knob-and-tube remnants mean any panel or circuit work goes to a licensed electrical contractor.

Sizing for 19°F

Every Bellingham address shares the same code design temperature — 19°F at station Bellingham 2 N, colder than Sea-Tac's 24°F. What differs street to street is the envelope. A 1910s one-and-a-half storey with knee walls and original single glazing carries a very different load from a mid-2000s two-storey built to a modern code, even at identical square footage. That is why we run the load rather than multiplying square feet by a constant.

We know the streets

If you are near Elizabeth Park, Little Squalicum Park, the Eldridge Avenue historic homes, we have worked nearby. Ask and we will tell you honestly what we have run into on that side of town.