Founded in Pasadena, Air Comfort Experts was born to provide enhanced indoor air comfort through technology. Working with manufacturers like Daikin, Trane, Bryant and Lennox, the family-owned business has become a one-stop shop for the design, installation, maintenance and repair of advanced heating and air-conditioning systems.
“We spend about 80% of our lives indoors,” owner Bulgantamir Enkh-erdene said. “You go to work indoors, unless you work mostly outside, and most people sleep about eight to 10 hours indoors. The cycle goes on. When you are indoors, you can control the quality of the air that’s being breathed plus the temperature and the relative humidity in the house, and it changes throughout the different seasons.”
A native of Mongolia, Bulga visited the United States for an international heating, ventilation and air-conditioning (HVAC) trade show and stayed in an Airbnb, where the heater broke down on his second day. Bulga recalled venturing to the basement and found a furnace so ancient that “it was something that I never seen before … from 50 or even 100 years ago.” It was winter, so Bulga used space heaters to warm the room.
On a later trip to the San Gabriel Valley, his central heater broke down again. He remembered thinking to himself, “What is with all these furnaces breaking down wherever I stay?”
As an entrepreneur in the HVAC industry, he wanted to address the problem he had experienced and began to research. He found that areas like the San Gabriel Valley with older houses tended to have systems in need of upgrades or replacements.
“I would think that out of all places, the United States and California would have the latest technology being offered to the homeowners, but that wasn’t the case,” Bulga said. “I come from (the world of) commercial and industrial HVAC, so we did a lot of high-end, high-tech and sophisticated engineering work on projects like hospitals, international airports, underground mines and big data centers where we imported a lot of the cutting-edge and newest possible technology equipment for our projects.
“My crew already had knowledge in how to design better, more efficient and cleaner products and green products to all sectors, from residential to industrial. … We’re going to bring comfort and we’re going to do it in an expertly fashion, and that is the reason why we founded Air Comfort Experts.”
Today, the company uses an inverter heat pump technology that Bulga described as perfect for Southern California weather. Heat pumps function by using heat transfer to take ambient heat from outdoor air and move it indoors. It is known to be a cleaner method of heating homes.
“Because of the upgrades in the technology, the heat pump has become a global movement,” Bulga said. “One huge reason why the heat pump is a much better alternative to a traditional furnace is that it is correctly sized. What we’ve seen, especially in Southern California, is that furnaces are extremely oversized. What happens is … when you have a furnace, you turn it on, it instantaneously throws out this hot air and it overheats the rooms. Sometimes you have to open the windows because it’s just too hot, and that’s a very typical problem in Southern California homes.”
Bulga said that Air Comfort Experts’ system offers a more individualized experience, accounting for variables like the windows, floor, insulation, ceiling height, directional orientation and number of people living in a house.
“We communicate with homeowners and ask a lot of questions where we want to figure out how many kids they have, if the kids like to be colder or if they fight for the right of the thermostat,” he explained. “If that’s the case, we could put a thermostat in every room, including the bathrooms, where you can have individualized personal comfort.”
In regard to the company’s software, Bulga said that Air Comfort Experts utilizes a Manual J heat load calculation software generated by Wrightsoft that creates calculations for each room of a property so that the incoming system fits like a glove. The company also uses a Mitsubishi Diamond System Builder to ensure that they select the equipment based on actual load sizes to prevent being undersized or oversized.
“With all these rebates and incentives that the federal government and the state are providing, we can offer the latest in technology products that are energy efficient at the price point of a basic system,” Bulga said. “We are certified and enrolled in all of the state and federal incentive programs so that our clients can benefit double dip, triple dip, quadruple dip out of all these rebates. Eventually, in some cases when it’s done right, you get more than half of your investment back from rebates.”
For Bulga, he said that customer experience is paramount to the success of a business and that these relationships should be built on trust. He called his team of engineers and technicians the “nicest people that you can ever meet,” many of which have been with the company for over a decade. He added that they are as professional and knowledgeable as they are honest and down to earth.
“If you need one thing replaced or repaired, that is what you’re going to get,” Bulga said. “We will not try to upsell for something unnecessary, or if we find an issue that is not going to be worthwhile repairing, no matter what money you throw in, you’re going to get a recommendation to replace the unit.
“My father founded the first HVAC company in Mongolia; we’ve been in business for over 30 years now, and as a kid I have always been following my father for his projects. … That’s how I have been raised, learning that you can be a businessman and make money, but your reputation is the only thing that you have at the end of the day, and you don’t want to lose that because trust is very hard to earn but really easy to break.”
Bulga said that he has built trust in the community by honoring his word and that it’s a business model he hopes will serve the company well as Air Comfort Experts looks to the future. He added that the business will be expanding with new branches in Florida and the Bay Area with the long-term vision of becoming a franchise that helps people throughout the nation.
With an eye on incoming 2025 mandates declaring that all air-conditioning products must have zero global warming potential, Bulga shared that his dream is to increase services for local customers like the company did last year with its solar panel and backup battery services.
“We mostly have clear skies in Southern California, so my passion is to put solar panels on every roof,” he said. “You don’t really have to be an environmentalist … because we are all just people; we want to be comfortable, and we want to bring comfort to ourselves as efficiently and cheaply as possible. That’s what you are going to get from our company. We’re looking to pure technology, trying to make it as comfortable as possible and as efficient as possible and get you the maximum amount of savings.”
Source: Pasadena Weekly. (2024, January 18). [Air Comfort Experts Perfects Temperature With Technology]. Pasadena Weekly, p. 12.