Repair, installation and maintenance of ductless systems
We work on ductless mini-splits at every stage: installing new single-zone and multi-zone systems, repairing systems that have stopped cooling or heating properly, and maintaining them so they keep the efficiency they were bought for.
On the repair side, the common faults are their own category. Blinking error codes on the indoor head, a system that runs but never reaches setpoint, water dripping from the head because the condensate drain has clogged or the line has lost its slope, an outdoor inverter board fault, a communication error between the head and the condenser, or a refrigerant leak at a flare connection that was never torqued correctly at install.
Maintenance is different from a ducted system and easier to neglect. Each indoor head has its own washable filters and a blower wheel that grows biofilm in a humid room; the outdoor unit still needs its coil cleaned and its charge verified. A head that smells musty or has lost half its airflow is almost always a cleaning issue rather than a failed component.
We service ductless equipment whether or not we installed it. If you also have central air in the house, our AC repair and AC maintenance pages cover that side.
Which rooms and homes ductless suits
Ductless is the right answer where duct is either absent or not worth building: garage conversions, ADUs, in-law units, sunrooms, attic and bonus rooms, additions, and detached offices or studios.
It also fits the one-room problem — the bedroom above the garage, the west-facing office that is unusable by afternoon, the master that never matches the thermostat. Adding a head to that room is usually less invasive and more effective than re-engineering the whole duct system to serve it.
Older Sacramento homes with plaster walls and no attic path are another strong case, because running new duct there means opening up finishes throughout the house.
It is a weaker fit where a home already has healthy, well-sized ductwork and the goal is simply replacing aging central equipment. In that case a central system usually costs less and keeps a single, familiar set of controls.
How ductless differs from a ducted system
A ducted system conditions air in one place and distributes it through a duct network to the whole house from a single thermostat. A ductless system puts the evaporator directly in the room it serves and connects it to the outdoor unit with a small refrigerant line set, so there is no duct network and no duct losses.
That produces real differences in practice. Each ductless head is its own zone with its own setpoint, so rooms can genuinely differ instead of fighting over one thermostat. Inverter compressors modulate rather than cycling hard on and off, which is why they hold temperature steadily and run quietly.
The trade-offs are equally real. Every zone needs a visible indoor head and a line-set path, multi-zone systems cost more than a single zone, and the install quality matters more than with a ducted system — evacuation, flare torque and charge are where mini-splits fail years later.
Diagnostics differ too. Inverter-driven equipment reports faults through error codes and communication between boards, so troubleshooting is as much electronic as it is refrigeration work.
