Heat pumps and mini splits in Irongate

The houses in Irongate

Irongate is not a residential neighborhood in any normal sense — it is the city’s light-industrial district off Hannegan and Bakerview, built out in metal buildings, tilt-up warehouses, shop-and-office units, and contractor yards. What housing exists is incidental: a caretaker unit, an office mezzanine converted to living space, or an older parcel that predates the industrial platting. Buildings are slab-on-grade with exposed steel structure and high ceilings, which changes every assumption you would make about a house.

What is probably heating yours right now

Heating out here is gas unit heaters hanging from the structure, packaged rooftop units on the office half, and electric wall or cabinet heaters in the small shop-front units. Cooling exists only where the office needs it, and the shop side is often unconditioned. A lot of these tenants also have refrigeration equipment — walk-ins, reach-ins, prep tables — that matters more to their business than the space heating does.

What makes a Irongate install different

Irongate work is commercial work: rooftop access, curb adapters, three-phase power in some buildings and single-phase in others, and a landlord whose lease dictates what a tenant may hang on the roof or the wall. For the shop-and-office units, a wall-mounted ductless head conditioning the office while the shop stays on the unit heater is usually the sensible split. This is also where our refrigeration side gets most of its calls — there are not many shops in Whatcom County that service refrigeration, and being ten minutes from Irongate is part of why we get those jobs.

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 the Irongate industrial park, the Bakerview Road corridor, Hannegan Road, we have worked nearby. Ask and we will tell you honestly what we have run into on that side of town.