Heat pumps and mini splits in South Hill

The houses in South Hill

South Hill is the oldest concentration of large houses in Bellingham — tall Victorian and Craftsman homes built by the city’s first merchants on the bluff between downtown and Sehome Hill, many of them three storeys with full basements and a carriage house at the back. Ceilings are high, rooms are numerous, and floor plans were designed around fireplaces and radiators. Smaller houses and a few apartment conversions fill the side streets between the landmark properties.

What is probably heating yours right now

A lot of South Hill houses started on coal, moved to oil, and were converted to gas in the middle of the last century, so what you find in the basement is often a modern furnace attached to a distribution system that predates it by decades. Some still have hydronic radiators, which are worth keeping. Third floors and back bedrooms are commonly on baseboard or a wall heater because they were never on the trunk, and apartment conversions are all-electric.

What makes a South Hill install different

Volume is the design problem here: high ceilings and three storeys mean stack effect moves heat upward whether you want it to or not, so zoning matters more than raw capacity, and a multi-zone ductless system frequently outperforms one big ducted unit trying to serve the whole house. Where hydronic radiators are still in place, keeping them as backup heat and adding heat pump zones is usually the better project than ripping the loop out. These are visible, historically significant elevations on a bluff-top street, so we plan condenser placement to the side or rear and keep linesets off the street face; interior penetrations through plaster and old framing get located before we cut.

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 Wardner’s Castle, the turn-of-the-century homes along Knox Avenue, the bay overlook above Boulevard Park, we have worked nearby. Ask and we will tell you honestly what we have run into on that side of town.