HVAC, Heat Pumps & Refrigeration in Burnaby, BC
Burnaby changed shape faster than its mechanical stock did. The town centres the city planned around — Metrotown, Brentwood, Lougheed and Edmonds — have gone vertical, so a growing share of our Burnaby work now happens dozens of floors up, in a suite where the wall you need to pass a line set through belongs to the strata rather than to you. The rest of the city has barely moved: post-war houses on Capitol Hill, the retail strip along Hastings, light industrial tucked in behind it, and a campus community up the mountain. We work both Burnabys, and the difference between them is usually who has to approve the job before we can start it.
Towers, and the wall that is not yours
Metrotown, Brentwood and Lougheed have added concrete towers at a pace nothing else in Burnaby matches, and a condo retrofit runs into ownership long before it runs into refrigerant. Under BC strata law an owner needs written approval before altering common property or limited common property, and in most buildings the exterior wall a mini-split line set passes through is common property — as is the balcony slab the outdoor unit would stand on. A change to the building's external appearance can require a three-quarter vote at a general meeting rather than a nod from the council. That is a calendar problem rather than a technical one, and it is the part owners consistently underestimate.
What a strata council actually needs from you
We have put enough of these packages in front of Burnaby councils to know what stalls them. The council is being asked to accept a permanent change to a building it is responsible for, so it wants the equipment specification and its sound rating, a mounting detail that does not load a balcony slab in a way nobody has checked, a drawing of exactly where the wall is penetrated and how the penetration is sealed and flashed, a condensate route that cannot drip onto the suite below, and proof the contractor is insured. We assemble all of that before the meeting instead of after the first refusal, and we will attend to answer questions if the council would rather hear it from us.
The Heights and the small-commercial strips
Hastings Street through Burnaby Heights has been a working retail strip since the streetcar era, and it is full of exactly the businesses that live or die on refrigeration: butchers, bakeries, delis, specialty grocers and small restaurants running display cases, prep tables and a walk-in squeezed into the back. The buildings are narrow, the roofs carry a single package unit each, and access is often through the neighbouring tenancy. We schedule that work before opening and arrange roof access with the landlord in advance, so a technician is not standing on the sidewalk at six in the morning waiting on somebody to find a key.
SFU, UniverCity and buildings that decide as one
Burnaby Mountain is almost entirely multi-unit. The UniverCity community beside SFU was master-planned as apartments and townhomes rather than detached houses, and the older buildings around the campus are the same shape, so the person calling us is nearly always speaking for a whole building — a strata council, a rental owner, a property manager — rather than for one home. That concentration changes the work more than the equipment does. Attendance batches into a day and gets arranged with residents instead of booked suite by suite. Standardising the equipment across a building means the parts already on the truck fit the next unit. And whoever is paying wants to know what is trending across the property, not a verdict on suite 312.
Services in Burnaby
Usually yes, but the strata has to approve it first, because the exterior wall and the balcony are typically common property. We prepare the package a council needs — equipment and sound data, mounting and penetration details, condensate routing and insurance — so the request is decided on its merits rather than deferred for missing information.
Yes, and for retail we prefer to do it outside opening hours. Almost none of it reaches the sales floor — the work stays up on the roof. We confirm the access route and any fall-protection requirements before the visit rather than on the morning.
It is a large part of our Burnaby work. We batch attendance so one visit covers many suites instead of generating a return trip each time, keep the equipment list per building so what is on the truck matches what is installed, and send one report covering the whole property rather than one per call.
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