Maintenance Plans
Three tiers for commercial HVAC, refrigeration, walk-in/reach-in coolers, and commercial water heaters. Every plan waives the diagnostic fee on repairs, includes labor, and comes with DaVinci Portal for QR-coded asset tracking and scheduling.
For kitchens, markets, and high-load sites. Best for uptime, cleanliness, and energy control.
Great fit for retail, offices, and schools with moderate usage. Solid protection without over-servicing.
For lighter-duty sites that still want documentation and a yearly deep service to prevent surprises.
Every piece of equipment gets a unique QR code. Scan it to see completed services, technician notes, photos, upcoming scheduled work, and to book the next visit—all in one place.
Site-specific detail and all three tiers, by Orange County city.
Yes. Members never pay a separate diagnostic fee on repair calls. Parts are billed separately. Labor beyond the included hours is billed at the member rate.
We inventory the equipment during onboarding and tailor the PM scope and visit length. The tier determines frequency and included labor; pricing is based on your actual equipment count.
Yes. We can adjust frequency if your load or operations change (for example, moving from bi-annual to quarterly for a busy kitchen).
Yes. Every plan includes QR labels and full access to the Portal for service history, photos, notes, and scheduling.
The tier cards above describe what each plan includes. This section is about picking the right one, and the honest answer is that frequency should follow three things: the equipment on the roof and in the back of house, how many hours a day that equipment actually runs, and what a failure would cost the operation in lost product, closed doors or a failed inspection. Price and visit count are the wrong place to start. A single RTU over an office that runs eight hours a day and a single RTU over a dish pit that runs eighteen hours a day are not the same asset, even if they share a model number.
| Situation | Typical starting tier | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Full-service restaurant or commercial kitchen with walk-ins, reach-ins and an ice machine | Quarterly | Grease-laden air fouls RTU and condenser coils quickly; refrigeration runs 24 hours; health inspections depend on holding temperatures and sanitation records. |
| Grocery, c-store or market with display cases and walk-in boxes | Quarterly | Product loss is the dominant risk. Case and box temperatures drift gradually before they fail, and quarterly readings catch the drift. |
| Medical, dental or veterinary suite | Quarterly or bi-annual | Comfort complaints affect patients and staff; vaccine and medication refrigeration cannot be left to chance. Bi-annual works where refrigeration is monitored separately. |
| Retail storefront or office suite, standard hours, no refrigeration | Bi-annual | Two visits timed before summer and before winter cover the seasonal stress points without paying for visits the equipment does not need. |
| School or public building with RTUs, split systems and a boiler or water heater | Bi-annual | Occupancy is seasonal and predictable; a pre-summer visit and a pre-heating-season visit align with the academic calendar and procurement cycles. |
| Warehouse, light industrial or self-storage with few units and low occupancy | Annual | One thorough visit a year catches the handful of issues that would otherwise sit unnoticed and keeps a documented record for the asset. |
| Chiller, cooling tower or central plant of any size | Quarterly minimum, often with seasonal add-ons | Water treatment, tower cleanliness and refrigerant leak checks on larger charges do not tolerate long gaps between inspections. |
Two rules of thumb carry across every row. First, refrigeration pushes a site up one tier compared with the same building without it, because boxes and cases run around the clock and spoil inventory when they fail. Second, any equipment installed within the last two years can usually sit one tier lower than the table suggests while it is still under manufacturer warranty, as long as the warranty's maintenance requirements are met and documented. Mixed sites, such as a retail center with one restaurant tenant among a dozen dry tenants, are commonly split: quarterly on the kitchen and refrigeration assets, bi-annual on everything else, all under one agreement.
A maintenance visit is not a walk past the equipment with a clipboard. Every asset covered by the plan gets a defined task list that depends on its type, and every task that produces a number produces a recorded reading. The lists below are the core of what happens on each visit. Seasonal tasks, such as heat exchanger inspection before heating season or condenser cleaning before summer, are layered on top depending on the time of year.
Full equipment background sits in the resource library: the rooftop unit guide, the walk-in cooler and freezer guide, the ice machine guide, and the chillers and hydronic systems guide.
Any competent technician can take a reading. The value of a maintenance program comes from taking the same readings, the same way, on the same equipment, visit after visit, so that a change stands out. A compressor pulling amps within nameplate looks fine in isolation. The same compressor pulling ten percent more than it did two visits ago, on a condenser that was cleaned both times, is telling you something about the refrigerant circuit or the bearings before it tells you by failing on a Saturday in August.
| Reading | One visit | Across visits |
|---|---|---|
| Supply and return temperature split | Whether the unit is cooling within the expected range for the conditions. | A shrinking split with clean filters points to low charge, a fouled evaporator or a blower slowing down. |
| Compressor amp draw | Whether the compressor is within nameplate. | A steady climb with no change in load suggests mechanical wear or a condenser that is no longer rejecting heat properly. |
| Superheat and subcooling | Whether the charge and metering device are behaving. | Drifting subcooling on a sealed system is often the first sign of a slow leak, well before the unit stops cooling. |
| Capacitor microfarads | Whether the capacitor is within tolerance of its rating. | A capacitor losing a few percent each visit is scheduled for replacement on a PM visit instead of failing and taking a motor with it. |
| Walk-in box temperature and run time | Whether the box is holding set point. | Longer run cycles at the same set point and ambient usually mean a gasket, a defrost problem or a condenser that needs cleaning. |
| Chiller approach temperature | How effectively the heat exchanger is transferring heat today. | A rising approach is the standard indicator of tube fouling or scale, and it schedules the cleaning before efficiency collapses. |
This is also where maintenance and diagnostics meet. When a reading is out of range, the plan technician does not simply top off, tighten and leave. The same root-cause approach that governs repair calls governs maintenance findings, which is why plan sites tend to see fewer repeat failures on the same asset. A unit that keeps losing charge gets a leak search, not a recurring recharge line item.
Every asset on a plan gets a QR label at onboarding. The label ties the physical unit to a record in the DaVinci Portal that holds the nameplate data, the location on site, the full service history, every reading logged on every visit, the technician's notes, and the photos taken before and after work. Scanning the label with a phone opens that record. There is no app to install and no login hunt when a manager is standing on a roof trying to remember which of six identical units was the one that was down last spring.
The Portal record is built around the equipment, not around the contract. Reports can be exported for a health inspection binder, an insurance claim, a lease handoff or a capital request. Facility teams that need documentation for public-sector audits or prevailing-wage work find the same photo-and-reading format useful there too.
Southern California does not have the hard freeze that organizes maintenance calendars in other parts of the country, but it has its own rhythm, and the visit schedule is built around it rather than around the calendar quarter. The regional pattern is covered in depth in the Orange County commercial HVAC climate guide; the operational version is below.
This is the most important visit of the year for cooling equipment. Condenser coils are cleaned, refrigerant circuits are verified, capacitors and contactors are tested under load, and economizers are checked so they shut properly when outdoor air gets hot. The goal is to have every unit proven before the first heat event, because the first ninety-degree week is when marginal equipment fails and when every contractor's schedule fills with emergency calls. Plan customers get priority during that window, but the better outcome is not needing it.
Inland Orange County, the Inland Empire and the valleys see their hottest days in September and October, often during Santa Ana wind events that bring hot, dry, dusty air out of the high desert. Those winds load condenser coils with fine dust and debris in days, and they coincide with the time when rooftop filters are most clogged from a long cooling season. A quarterly plan places a visit in this window; bi-annual sites in inland areas often add a coil wash here. Because gas heat sections and boilers have sat idle since spring, this visit also covers the first heating-season checks: ignition, flame sense, heat exchanger inspection and combustion readings.
From Seal Beach down through Huntington Beach, Newport Beach and Laguna, salt air attacks condenser fins, cabinet fasteners, contactor terminals and copper line sets continuously. Coastal rooftop equipment does not fail on a seasonal schedule; it corrodes steadily until a fin pack crumbles or a terminal arcs. Coastal sites on any tier get fin inspection and a freshwater rinse as part of the visit, coated-coil options are recommended at replacement, and electrical terminations are examined more closely than they would be inland.
Mild winters make this the right time for work that needs equipment offline: heat exchanger inspection, major coil cleaning on refrigeration, chiller tube cleaning, boiler service and controls recommissioning. It is also the window for planning replacements so that crane days, permits and Title 24 paperwork are complete before the summer rush. See RTU replacement planning for what that lead time involves.
A maintenance plan reduces repairs; it does not eliminate them. What changes is how repairs happen. On a plan site, most repair needs are identified on a PM visit as a documented recommendation with photos and readings, which means the facility manager approves work from a desk with evidence in hand rather than from a parking lot during an outage. The diagnostic fee is waived on repair calls for plan members, included labor hours apply first, and labor beyond those hours is billed at the member rate. Parts are always billed separately and quoted before installation.
Plan status also matters for second opinions. If another contractor has recommended a replacement or a major repair, the plan record gives an independent baseline of how the unit has actually performed. Owners without that history can still request a second-opinion diagnostic before committing to a large expense.
Restaurant groups, property management companies, grocery operators, school districts and medical groups rarely want one agreement per address. Portfolio programs put every site under a single scope document with a per-site equipment schedule, so a twelve-location group with kitchens at eight of them and dry retail at four can run quarterly where it matters and bi-annual where it does not, with one point of contact and one reporting format. Site-level detail for Orange County cities is on the city plan pages, for example Irvine, Anaheim and Santa Ana; the full list is above.
Portfolios outside Orange County, in Los Angeles County, the Inland Empire, San Diego County and Ventura County, are taken on when the scope is large enough to justify consistent coverage, generally larger commercial, institutional or public work. Sector-specific context is on the property management, restaurants, grocery and retail and schools pages.
A clear boundary makes an agreement easier to live with. The following are outside a standard maintenance plan and are quoted separately when needed, so there is no surprise when they come up.
Most new plan customers arrive after years of calling whoever answered the phone when something broke. The equipment at those sites usually has no history, several deferred problems and at least one unit that has been limping. The first year of a program is about establishing a baseline and clearing the backlog in a controlled order, not about perfection on day one. The sequence below is typical for a mid-sized commercial site moving to a quarterly plan; bi-annual and annual sites follow the same shape with fewer visits.
The site has a complete, photo-documented record of every asset, a realistic list of what will need replacing and when, and a visit calendar aligned to the seasons that actually stress the equipment. Emergency calls do not disappear, but they stop being the way problems are discovered. The deeper version of this process is in the preventive maintenance program guide.
To start, request a walkthrough or call (714) 594-9194. The equipment count and operating hours from that visit determine the tier recommendation and the site-specific scope. For the service list behind each task above, see maintenance plans and the related equipment services, and for the people and credentials behind the work, see about Davinci Mechanical.