CMMS for HVAC contractors

The archetypal CMMS buyer owns their equipment, keeps it in one building and services it on a calendar. An HVAC or refrigeration contractor owns almost none of the kit they touch, finds it spread across forty customer sites, and does most of the work because a phone rang.

Nearly every mismatch between this trade and general maintenance software comes from that. Five things follow from it.

1. The equipment is mixed, and you did not install it

A plant maintenance team has thirty of the same pump. A contractor has one of everything, much of it installed by someone else, some of it older than the engineer sent to it, and a fair amount undocumented.

That makes the asset register do a different job. It is not a list of things you own — it is the only place the knowledge about unfamiliar equipment accumulates. The manual you eventually tracked down, the fact this model's high-pressure switch is behind the panel rather than on it, the part number that turned out to be superseded: none of that is in anybody's handbook, and it is worthless in an engineer's memory.

2. The work arrives by phone

Software sold on preventive maintenance is sold on the half of your work you have least control over. Planned service visits exist and matter, but the day is set by call-outs, and the question on a call-out is never "what does the schedule say". It is "what do I need to know about this machine before I open the panel".

The test for any product you are shown: how fast can an engineer who has never been to this site get the machine's history on a phone, standing in front of it? If that takes more than about fifteen seconds it will not be used at nine at night in the rain.

3. Half the visit is getting to the machine

Rooftop units, locked plant rooms, ceiling voids above a live restaurant, a site where the key is held by a caretaker who leaves at four. An address is not enough and everybody in this trade knows it, yet the access note is the field most systems treat as an afterthought.

It also has to be per-machine rather than per-site. Six units on one roof can have six different answers about which hatch, which isolator and whose permission.

4. Parts have to be recorded as parts

Contactors, capacitors, filter driers, sensors, fan motors. What matters is not that a part was changed but which part, with its maker reference, on which machine, on what date. A line on an invoice reading "materials" is not a record.

Kept properly, the parts history answers questions no schedule can: this compressor contactor has been replaced three times in two years, so the problem is not the contactor.

5. Refrigerant records are their own obligation

Work on equipment containing fluorinated refrigerants carries record-keeping duties — leak checking at intervals set by the charge, logs of quantities added and recovered, and evidence that the person doing the work is certified. The details are set in regulation and they change, so check the current requirements with your certifying body rather than trusting any vendor's summary, including this one.

What matters when choosing software is simply whether it claims to handle this. Plenty do not, and a general-purpose maintenance record is not an F-Gas log. If you need one, ask directly and do not accept "you could use a custom field".

What to ask a vendor

• Show me an engineer arriving at a machine they have never seen, on a phone, and finding out what happened to it last time.
• Where does the access note live, and is it per machine or per site?
• When a part is fitted on site, what does the machine's record look like afterwards — and does it name the part?
• What happens to this record when the engineer who created it leaves?
• Does it do F-Gas logging, yes or no?
• Can I get my data out, in full, without asking you?

Where Repair Control fits, and where it does not

It is built for the first four of those five. Every machine carries its own parts with maker references, its manuals and bulletins, an access note of its own, and a dated history of visits. Jobs are dispatched to engineers, closed from the field on a phone, signed off by the customer and billed — and closing the job is what writes the visit and the parts onto the machine, so the record is a by-product of the work rather than a second job afterwards.

There is also an assistant that reads that specific machine's manuals, part history and the tutorials your own engineers filmed on it, rather than generic knowledge, and answers from them.

What it does not do, plainly:

• No F-Gas logging. No refrigerant quantities, no leak-check intervals, no certificate tracking. If that is your first requirement, this is not your product yet.
• No preventive maintenance scheduling. Jobs carry a due date; nothing recurs on its own.
• No scheduling or dispatch board. Jobs are assigned to an engineer, but there is no calendar view and no routing between sites.
• No stock or van inventory.

So: a good fit for a contractor whose real problem is that nobody remembers what happened to that machine last time. A poor fit if what you need first is a compliance log or a planner. What it costs, or how it compares to field service software.