Emergency commercial HVAC service and repair, 24 hours a day

One number for the office and the emergency line

There is no separate after-hours number to hunt for in a binder. Call (615) 814-6338. Monday through Friday from 7am to 4pm, the office answers and schedules the call. Nights, weekends and holidays, the same number answers with a short phone menu. Choose the emergency option and you reach our 24/7 emergency service.

For anything that is down right now, call rather than email or fill out the form. Email to Service@britemech.com is the right place for maintenance requests, quotes and paperwork; a phone call is the fastest way to tell us what has failed and what is at risk.

What to have ready when you call

You do not need all of this to call. Every item you do have shortens the time between our arrival and the fix, because it tells us what to bring and where to look first.

What to tell us	Why it helps
Which equipment, and where	Rooftop unit, chiller, boiler, cooling tower, air handler or computer room unit, plus the unit number and whether it is on the roof, in the mechanical room or on a pad outside.
A photo of the nameplate	Make, model and serial number tell us the tonnage, the refrigerant, the age and which parts the unit uses. A phone photo is better than a read-over-the-phone model number.
The alarm or fault code	Whatever the controller, thermostat or building automation screen is showing. Photograph it before anyone resets anything; the first alarm is usually the one that explains the rest.
What tripped, and when	A breaker, a disconnect, a safety on the unit, a GFCI on a pump. The time it stopped, and whether anything happened just before: a storm, a power blip, a loud noise, a smell.
What is at risk	Servers, a production line, patients, product in cold storage, a building full of people. That tells us what the temporary plan has to protect.

What to do while you wait

• Do not keep resetting it. One reset after the alarm is written down is reasonable. If it drops out again, leave it off. Every restart into the same fault can take out a compressor, burn a motor or freeze an evaporator, and turns a repair into a replacement.
• Protect the critical room first. Close the doors to a server or telecom room, shut down any equipment in it that is not essential, and turn off lighting and anything else adding heat. In a hot building, keep the critical room isolated from the rest.
• Bring in portable cooling if you have it. A portable spot cooler in a server room buys time, as long as its hot exhaust is vented out of the room through a ceiling tile or a door panel. A fan alone just stirs hot air around.
• Shut down equipment that is failing loudly. Grinding, screeching, banging or a burning smell means something is destroying itself. Turn it off at the disconnect. A seized bearing is a repair; the motor and shaft it takes with it are a bigger one.
• In a freeze, keep water moving. If the heat is out in hard cold, keep hydronic pumps running if they will, and watch coils that see outside air. A frozen and split coil is a second emergency on top of the first.

Critical loads cool first, the permanent fix second

On an emergency call, the first question is not "what part failed," it is "what has to stay cool, or warm, until that part is here." Sometimes the answer is a temporary fix: running the healthy circuit on a two-compressor rooftop unit while the failed one is locked out, a spot cooler on the server rack, staging a process load down, or a substitute part that is safe to run until the right one arrives.

It is the same thinking that kept a TV station on the air one weekend night, when George laid garden soaker hoses over a condenser coil to hold head pressure until a new fan motor showed up. Resourceful beats "nothing can be done until the parts come in."

The emergencies we are called for

Most after-hours calls fall into a few groups. Server and telecom room cooling failures, where every hour counts because the equipment will shut itself down. Chiller trips on process lines and medical equipment. Rooftop units down on a retail floor or in a kitchen in July. And boiler lockouts in cold weather, when a building has to be warm by the time people arrive. We work only on commercial and industrial equipment, every make and model, from 1 ton to 200 tons.

After the emergency is over

You get the same written record as any other service call: what failed, why we think it failed, what we did that night, and what the permanent repair is if the first one was temporary. If the failure points to something bigger, like a unit that is near the end of its life or a problem that will take down other equipment, we say so and rank what to fix first.

Most emergencies are a maintenance problem that ran out of time. A maintenance agreement puts each unit on a schedule and on paper, so a slipping belt or a swelling capacitor gets replaced on a Tuesday morning instead of failing on a Saturday night.

We take emergency calls across the Middle Tennessee towns and counties we serve, from Nashville and Hendersonville to commercial buildings in Clarksville.

Emergency service questions