Serving Washington, DC, Prince George’s County, Montgomery County & Northern Virginia, including Upper Marlboro, Hyattsville, District Heights and Silver Spring.
If the AC quit, the furnace will not fire, the heat pump is acting strange, the water heater has gone cold or the air in the house simply feels off, this is the place to start.
Nero's Heating & Air handles heating, cooling, water heaters, indoor air quality and light commercial HVAC across DC, Maryland and Northern Virginia. That includes repairs, replacements, installations and maintenance, depending on what the system actually needs.
The services below are grouped by equipment, so you do not have to know the diagnosis before you click. Find the system causing the problem, choose what sounds closest to what is happening, and go from there. If you still cannot tell where the issue starts, call us. That part is our job.
Cooling work in the DMV runs from June through September, and it fails hardest in the weeks it is needed most. We repair systems that run without cooling, replace the ones that have finished, service them before the season starts, and take emergency calls when a house has gone hot overnight. Most of what we work on was installed by somebody else entirely.
Furnaces, boilers and radiators, which in older DMV housing often means equipment older than anyone living with it. We repair and replace furnaces, service and install boilers, balance and repair radiator systems, and perform the annual combustion check a gas appliance needs. When the heat goes out on a cold night, that is an emergency call rather than a scheduled one.
One machine carrying both seasons, which means it runs roughly twice the hours a furnace or an air conditioner does and behaves unlike either of them. We repair heat pumps, replace them, and service them on a schedule that covers the parts a cooling-only visit never touches. The defrost cycle and the backup heat strips are where most of the faults we find sit.
For the rooms ductwork never reached: a finished attic, a converted porch, an addition on the back of a rowhouse. We repair indoor heads that have stopped or started leaking, and we install single and multi-zone systems. The question worth asking before you buy is how many heads the house needs, which is usually fewer than a quote suggests.
Tank and tankless, repaired where a repair will hold and replaced where it will not. A leaking tank is finished and no part fixes it. A failed element, thermostat or valve on a sound tank usually is worth repairing. We tell you which of the two you have before quoting anything, because that difference is the whole decision.
Three services, and the list is genuinely three. We clean ducts where one of the EPA's three conditions is met, and we install whole-home humidifiers and dehumidifiers for the two opposite problems a DMV house has six months apart. Purification, UV and whole-home filtration are not on that list and never have been, which is worth knowing before somebody quotes you for one.
Rooftop packaged units, air handlers and split systems at smaller properties. It is the same trade as the residential work and the same components, sitting somewhere considerably harder to reach, which is what the rooftop visit fee pays for. We service and repair. We do not design systems for a build-out, and we are not set up for multi-site contracts.
We work across the DC metro from our base in Cheverly, Maryland.
If your address is not on the list, call and we will confirm for you. (202) 750-9543
See service areaTell us what the house is doing and we will point you at the right service. We work across Washington DC, Prince George's County, Montgomery County, Southern Maryland and Northern Virginia, including Upper Marlboro, Hyattsville, District Heights and Silver Spring. Call (202) 750-9543 to book a visit, or use the form and we will come back with what the visit costs and the earliest day we have.
“Needed an emergency AC fix on a brutally hot Saturday. He arrived within 30 minutes of me calling and before the scheduled time, quickly diagnosed and fixed the problem. He was very candid and professional and gave honest, great advice. It wasn’t cheap, but for a Saturday night summer heat emergency it was totally worth it.”
Zach Saltman
Yes. Ask for it during the visit and the technician writes down what was measured, what the reading was, and what the part is. You own that paperwork whether or not you go ahead with the work.
This matters more than it sounds. A diagnosis that says "compressor is bad" tells a second company nothing. One that gives the capacitor's rated microfarads against what it measured, or the pressures either side of a restriction, can be checked by anyone. If a company will not write down what it measured, that is worth knowing before you spend.
Yes. The diagnostic is $75 and it covers the technician's time finding the fault. It is waived when you schedule the repair, and it stands when you do not.
An after-hours, Sunday or rooftop call is $169 and that one is not waived, because somebody is coming out at a time nobody is scheduled to work. A replacement estimate is a different case. If your system is already being replaced and you want a quote, that visit is free, because nothing is being diagnosed.
No. A sealed system does not consume refrigerant. If it is low, it leaked, and adding more without finding the leak means you will be back where you started, on a schedule set by the size of the hole.
The test is what you are shown. Ask where the leak is and how it was found, and ask to see the readings before anything is added. A technician who has located it can point at it. One who cannot has sold you a season. There are times a controlled top-up is the right call, for example to get through a heatwave before a planned replacement, and that should be said out loud rather than billed as a repair.
Often, yes. Cast-iron boilers outlast almost everything else in a house, and a thirty-year-old unit that fires cleanly and holds pressure is not a problem waiting to happen just because of its age.
What decides it is combustion and condition, not the date on the plate. A boiler that has lost its expansion tank, weeps at the relief valve or short cycles on every call has something specific wrong, and those are repairs. A cracked section or a flue that cannot be made safe is where the conversation changes. Age on its own is a selling argument, not a diagnosis.
Yes, but "central" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. You can have cooling in every room without a conventional duct system, and in a pre-1950 house that is usually the better answer.
Ductless handles it head by head, with one outdoor unit feeding several indoor units, and no ductwork at all. High-velocity ducted systems get you closer to what people picture, using small runs that fit where standard sheet metal will not. Full conventional ductwork in a finished older house means soffits, lost closet space and plaster repair, and it is the option most people drop once they see where the runs would go.
One year on installations and 30 days on repairs, from us. The manufacturer's parts warranty on new equipment runs separately and much longer.
What shortens it is the thing most people do not read. Manufacturers require documented annual maintenance to honor parts claims, and the claim gets refused when there is no record of it. Changes made by somebody else to the system we installed also fall outside our labor coverage. Neither is unusual in this trade, and both are worth knowing on day one rather than in year two.
