Most homeowners have already read the theory. What they actually want to know is what happens to their house between breakfast and dinner. Here is the clock, start to finish, including the parts other contractors skip.
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A typical Shoreview installation is a single day with one crew. Longer if we are rerouting bath exhaust out of an attic, shorter on a walkout with a clean rim joist and a straight shot to the mechanical room.
You get a text with the truck's window and the lead tech's name. Nobody surprises you at the door.
We park where we will not block a shared drive and carry in drop cloths before tools.
Ten minutes, tape in hand. We mark where the cabinet hangs, where the two exterior hoods land, and which joist bays the trunk runs through.
This is your last easy chance to veto a hood location. Speak up here and it costs nothing to move.
Two cored openings, sleeved and sloped slightly outward, with hoods set at the separation the equipment requires so exhaust does not short-circuit into the intake.
Siding gets cut cleanly and flashed. On stucco and older brick elevations we slow down and use a different bit than we would on vinyl or LP.
The unit goes up on isolated hangers, not screwed flat to a joist, because vibration transmitted into framing is what homeowners actually hear at night.
A heat-recovery core produces condensate in winter, so it gets a trapped drain to the floor drain or a pump. This step is where a rushed install shows up as a puddle in February.
Insulated duct on the outdoor legs to stop sweating, sealed joints, and gentle radius turns instead of hard elbows wherever the bay allows.
Pickup points come from the rooms that make the problem — baths, laundry, and in Shoreview's many lake-side walkouts, the lower level that runs coolest.
Dedicated circuit or an approved tie-in, then the wall control goes somewhere you will actually reach it rather than behind a laundry door.
If the unit interlocks with the furnace blower for distribution, we set and label that behavior instead of leaving it on a factory default.
Measured airflow on both the supply and exhaust side, adjusted until the pair is balanced. We record the numbers.
We also verify the exterior hoods are not pulling from each other and that the defrost or recirculation strategy actually cycles.
Five minutes on the wall control, the filter interval, and how to pull and rinse the core. You keep the commissioning numbers and the model documentation.
Cardboard and offcuts leave with us. Floors get swept before the drop cloths come up.
This is a city built around a chain of lakes — Snail, Turtle, Owasso, and the Sucker Lake corridor — and most of the housing stock went up between the late fifties and the eighties under a heavy oak canopy. Three practical consequences on install day. Lake-adjacent lots often have walkouts and higher water tables, so we terminate on a side elevation and keep the condensate path short and trapped. Mature canopy means leaf litter and pollen, so hood screens get specified with cleaning in mind rather than the finest mesh available. And the tree roots and grade changes on older lots mean we walk the exterior before the truck is unloaded, not after.
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Request a Shoreview install windowRun it on low continuously rather than in bursts; the whole point is steady exchange. Watch your glass on the first hard cold snap and tell us what it does. If you had a humidifier fighting a losing battle, retune it now instead of replacing it. And check the filter at day thirty even though the manual says later — new construction dust, remodel dust, and a first heating cycle load it faster than the interval assumes. One call gets a tech back out to retest balance if anything feels off.
Which core the house needs (or tell us you want that decided first), the mechanical room location, and whether an existing exchanger comes out. Photos of the furnace area and the exterior wall you would prefer us to use shorten the visit meaningfully.
No. The blower stays available except during the electrical tie-in, which is normally under an hour. In deep winter we sequence the wiring work first so the heat is never down long, and we will tell you the window before we start cutting.
Two, each the diameter of a dryer vent, placed with the required separation so exhaust is not immediately drawn back into the intake. Both get a hooded cap, backdraft protection, exterior sealant, and interior air sealing at the sleeve.
Preferably on a sheltered elevation that is not downwind of the driveway, not buried behind a deck skirt, and not under a soffit where exhaust will loop back. On lake lots we usually land on a side wall rather than the water-facing wall so shoreline wind does not pressurize the intake.
Only if your bathroom exhaust currently terminates in the attic or soffit, which we correct while we are there if the scope calls for it. A basic exchanger installation stays in the mechanical room, the joist bays, and the two exterior penetrations.
That supply and exhaust airflow match within tolerance, measured at the ports rather than assumed from a nameplate. An unbalanced unit either pressurizes the house, which pushes moisture into wall cavities, or depressurizes it, which can pull at combustion appliance draft. It is the part of the day that separates a real installation from a hung box.
On low speed most homeowners report a sound somewhere between a bathroom fan two rooms away and nothing at all. Noise complaints almost always trace to a hard elbow at the unit or a duct that got strapped tight against framing, both of which we design out before install day.
Tell us the house and we will send a flat installed price plus the next two available install days.
If you have not settled heat recovery versus energy recovery yet, start here.