Confluence Heating & Air repairs, replaces and installs furnaces, air conditioners and heat pumps for homes across Dayton and the Miami Valley. You reach a local line, describe the problem, and we set up a visit to look at the actual equipment before anyone quotes a fix.
Tell us what's going on and we'll come take a look.
What we do
Equipment does not fail at random. It fails where the climate loads it hardest and the house gives it the least help. In Dayton that is a cold, long heating season, a humid summer, and a housing stock that is mostly older than the furnaces in it. Every figure on this page comes from a public source listed at the bottom.
Read the guide →Furnace, air conditioner or heat pump not doing its job? Confluence Heating & Air diagnoses and repairs residential heating and cooling systems across Dayton and the Miami Valley. Call the local line, describe what the system is doing, and we will set up a visit.
HVAC Repair →Central air not cooling, running nonstop, or icing up? Confluence Heating & Air repairs split-system air conditioners across Dayton and the Miami Valley. Call the local line and we will set up a visit.
AC Repair →Furnace blowing cold, cycling on and off, or not starting at all? Confluence Heating & Air repairs gas furnaces across Dayton and the Miami Valley. Call the local line and describe what it is doing.
Furnace Repair →Replacing a worn-out furnace or installing one in a home that never had forced air? Confluence Heating & Air sizes, installs and commissions gas furnaces for Dayton and Miami Valley homes. Estimates are free and start with a look at the house, not the old nameplate.
Furnace Installation & Replacement →Replacing a tired central air system or adding cooling to a house that has only ever had heat? Confluence Heating & Air designs and installs split-system air conditioners for Dayton and Miami Valley homes. Free in-home estimates, sized for your house rather than the old label.
AC Installation & Replacement →Heat pumps heat and cool from one outdoor unit, and the current cold-climate models hold their output well into Dayton winters. Confluence Heating & Air installs and repairs heat pumps and ductless mini-splits across Dayton and the Miami Valley, and will tell you plainly when one is and is not the right fit.
Heat Pump & Mini-Split Installation →A furnace that quits on a 10-degree night or an air conditioner that dies in a heat advisory is not a wait-until-Monday problem. Confluence Heating & Air takes urgent heating and cooling calls from Dayton and Miami Valley homes on a local line that is answered around the clock.
Emergency HVAC Repair →Why here
Dayton sits in Climate Zone 5A under the energy code Ohio adopted, which means cold winters and humid summers. The 1991-2020 normals for Dayton International Airport show about 5,645 heating degree days a year against about 900 cooling degree days. A furnace here does the bulk of the year's work; the air conditioner gets a short, intense season with July highs averaging near 84 degrees and dew points that keep indoor humidity high.
Roughly 95 percent of those heating degree days fall between October and April, and January alone accounts for about a fifth of the annual total. That is a long, sustained load on a gas furnace. Igniters, inducer motors, flame sensors and blower bearings do not wear out at random; they wear out under exactly this kind of duty cycle, and they usually announce it on the coldest night of the month.
The housing stock makes it worse. According to the 2020-2024 American Community Survey, the median home in the city of Dayton was built around 1951, and about three quarters of the city's housing units went up before 1970. Across Montgomery County the median is about 1966. These houses were built for coal, then oil, then gas: undersized returns, long duct runs through unconditioned basements, plaster walls with little insulation. A new furnace or heat pump dropped into that envelope without a load calculation will short-cycle, run loud and never quite satisfy the thermostat.
And the fuel is gas. About 68 percent of occupied homes in Dayton and about 63 percent across Montgomery County heat with utility gas, delivered through what was the Vectren system and is now CenterPoint Energy's Ohio territory. That means most repair calls in this region are gas furnace calls, and the safety side of the work, checking heat exchangers, venting and combustion, matters as much as getting the heat back on.
How it works
You call or send the form. Whoever answers asks what the system is doing, roughly how old it is, and whether anyone in the house is without heat or cooling right now. That triage decides how the visit gets scheduled. When the technician arrives, the first step is diagnosis, not a parts list: static pressure, temperature split, refrigerant pressures, combustion readings, and a look at the equipment nameplate and the ductwork it is attached to.
You get a plain explanation of what failed and why, what the repair costs, and, if the unit is old enough that the repair is a bad bet, what a replacement would involve. The repair-versus-replace call is yours. If you choose replacement, the estimate is based on a load calculation for your house, not a rule of thumb off the old unit's label, and it is written out so you can compare it line by line.
The work is scheduled, done, and tested under load before the truck leaves. Every job ends with the system running, the thermostat verified, and a walkthrough of anything you should watch for.
Our approach
Diagnose before quoting. A technician who has not measured pressures, read the flame or pulled a filter to look at the coil is guessing, and guessing is expensive on your side of the invoice. Every visit starts with measurements, and the write-up tells you what they were.
Repair when repair makes sense. A twelve-year-old furnace with a bad igniter needs an igniter, not a sales pitch. A twenty-five-year-old furnace with a cracked heat exchanger needs to be shut off and replaced, and you will be told exactly why. The line between those two is explained in dollars and years, not urgency.
Size and install for this house and this climate. Zone 5A, an older envelope, a basement return that was never sealed: these are the things that decide whether a new system is comfortable. Installations include a load calculation, a look at the ductwork's capacity, and combustion and airflow testing at startup.
This site covers residential HVAC work in Dayton and the surrounding cities: gas furnaces, central air conditioners, heat pumps and ductless mini-splits, plus the thermostats, ductwork and venting that make them work. It does not cover commercial rooftop units, boilers or geothermal loops. Staying in one lane means the truck stock, the diagnostic habits and the estimates are all tuned to the equipment actually found in Miami Valley houses.
Most of that equipment is a gas furnace paired with a split-system air conditioner, installed sometime between the late 1990s and the mid-2010s, in a house built decades earlier. That combination is the core of what we work on, and the pages linked above describe how each type of job is handled.
Service area
Confluence Heating & Air works in the city of Dayton and in the ring of cities around it: Kettering, Oakwood, Centerville, Miamisburg and West Carrollton to the south; Beavercreek, Riverside, Fairborn and Xenia to the east; Huber Heights and Vandalia to the north; Englewood and Trotwood to the west; and Springboro at the Warren County line. Each city page below covers what is specific to that town's housing and equipment.
Questions
Repair visits carry a diagnostic fee, which is quoted before the visit is scheduled and applied toward the repair if you go ahead with it. Estimates for a new furnace, air conditioner or heat pump are free and carry no obligation.
Check that the thermostat is set to heat and has fresh batteries, that the furnace switch (it looks like a light switch, usually on the unit or a nearby joist) is on, and that the filter is not packed solid. If you smell gas, leave the house and call the gas utility's emergency line first. Otherwise, close off unused rooms, open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls so pipes stay warmer, and let us know if anyone in the home is elderly or medically vulnerable so the call is prioritized.
Age, the cost of the repair relative to a new unit, the condition of the heat exchanger or compressor, and how well the current unit is sized for the house. A repair that costs more than a third to half of a replacement on a unit past fifteen years is usually not a good bet. You get both numbers and the reasoning, and you decide.
Call the local line or send the form, and we will get back to you to set up a visit.
Request a free estimate Call (937) 719-5148