HVAC Service in Travis Heights, Austin

Travis Heights was laid out in 1912 by Newning, Swisher and General Stacy on the hills between South Congress Avenue and what is now I-35, from Lady Bird Lake down to Oltorf Street. Building crawled along until the 1920s, when Austin’s growth finally pushed south across the river. The older Fairview Park development, from the late nineteenth century, sits inside the same boundaries on the west side of Blunn Creek.

Blunn Creek is the neighborhood’s spine. Stacy Park follows it, with the spring-fed Big Stacy pool and the Little Stacy park and pool. The Blunn Creek Nature Preserve protects close to 40 acres of trails and history plaques, and South Congress is a short walk west.

The older houses here went up before central air existed, and it shows. Large historic homes sit beside small cottages, apartments and tall modern rebuilds, often on lots so steep that one end of the house rests on a slab and the other on piers. The crawlspace under a house like that can be roomy at the front and a tight squeeze at the back.

Cooling arrived decades later, and the ducts went wherever they fit: shallow attics, under floors, boxed into closets. Those runs can leak into spaces that are hot in July and damp in March. On the slopes, west- and south-facing walls take the hard afternoon sun, while lots shaded by big trees near the creek hold moisture and leaf litter.

So we start by finding where the cooled air actually goes. On these houses, sealing and insulating the duct connections under the floor or in the attic often does more than a bigger unit would. When the AC quits, our AC repair technicians find the fault and explain whether a repair makes sense on a system that age. If a back bedroom never cools or the system runs all afternoon, call 512-489-4653 or schedule online.

For heat, many Travis Heights homes have a gas furnace tucked into a closet or attic, and others run heat pumps. Our heating repair and replacement team works on both, and if the old furnace is near the end, we can walk you through furnace replacement. To see the choices before anyone visits, build your own system online.

Back additions, converted porches and garage apartments are common here, and the original system rarely reaches them. A ductless mini-split heats and cools that room on its own, fed by a small line set instead of new ductwork cut through old walls. Gold Eagle is a Mitsubishi Electric Diamond Contractor and installs Mitsubishi ductless systems for single rooms and whole houses. In a local historic district, we check the design standards before placing equipment where it shows from the street.

Crawlspaces and damp creekside lots can pull humid, musty air into the house, and every spring the big oaks drop pollen and tassels onto outdoor coils. Our air quality services cover dehumidification, filtration and duct cleaning, and on high-pollen days the daily Austin air quality index is worth a look before you open the windows. A Home Maintenance Plan gets the coils cleaned and the system checked twice a year, which counts for more on a 1920s house than on a new one.

The park along Blunn Creek is named for General Stacy, one of the 1912 founders, and the pool at Little Stacy Park was built by the WPA during the Great Depression.

Bonus: the neighborhood middle school, long known as Fulmore, was renamed in 2018 for Sarah Lively, a teacher who started there in 1964.

Top photo: a drone view over Travis Heights, looking north across Lady Bird Lake to downtown Austin. Photo by Hensbread, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

For owners of older Travis Heights houses, these guides take on the questions that come up most: repair or replace, where the air leaks, what a tune-up covers, and how a heat pump handles a hard cold snap.

• Repair or Replace? Deciding What’s Best for Your HVAC System
• Where Your Home Actually Leaks: A Central Texas Homeowner’s Guide to Air Infiltration Priorities
• What’s Included in an HVAC Tune-Up?
• Cedar Fever: What Austin Residents Need to Know
• Can a Heat Pump Keep Up With a Texas Freeze?

Browse every guide in the Gold Eagle Resource Center