OUR STORY
A trade learned in the Army, practiced house by house in Columbus
Derek Hollis did not come to heating and cooling through a sales floor or a family shop. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2011 and spent eight years on the equipment that keeps buildings livable: furnaces, rooftop units, split systems, and controls, maintained on a schedule, in barracks and offices and motor pools, in weather that ranged from desert heat to the kind of cold that finds every weak seal in a building. The work had a rhythm he never lost. Measure. Write it down. Compare it against what the equipment should show. Then decide, and sign your name to the decision.
He came home to the Columbus area in 2019 and hired onto residential crews, and the education ran the other direction for a while. The systems were smaller. The buildings were older, stranger, and loved. A furnace in German Village might sit in a cellar older than the Army itself. A Clintonville house could hide its ductwork in walls built before ductwork was a thought. Three years of that taught him the city's housing stock the only way it can be learned: one furnace room at a time.
In 2022 he started Cap City Heating & Air from a small rented bay on the south side of Columbus, with a used van and the logbook habit intact. Maya Chen joined in 2023 from school district building maintenance, where a failed system announces itself to a building full of children by first period. Eddie Ruiz, who had run logistics in the Army in the same years, took over the phone and the route in 2024. Three people. Two vans. One metro.
The name is the city's own: Cap City, the capital, the way Columbus people say it. The territory matches the name, from the Outerbelt neighborhoods out to the county seats, and no farther.
What we run on
Readings before opinions
A diagnosis is a set of measurements with a conclusion attached, and the measurements are the part a homeowner can check. What was measured, what it should read, and what it read: those three numbers ride with every diagnosis here, on every visit. If our conclusion is wrong, the numbers are where you will catch it.
The system you have comes first
Repair is the trade here. Replacement enters the conversation when a furnace or air conditioner is genuinely at the end, a heat exchanger failed, a compressor gone, parts no longer made, and you will hear the readings that say so, alongside the repair price where a repair exists. Keeping the system you own working, when it can be kept working honestly, is the entire business model.
One metro, known well
Cap City works the Columbus metro only: the pre-war streets inside the Outerbelt, the postwar ranches, the growth suburbs, and Delaware, Marysville, Lancaster, and Newark at the edges. Knowing one metro's housing stock, street by street and decade by decade, is worth more to a homeowner than a statewide map and a stranger at the door.
The logbook habit
Every visit's readings go into the company logbook. When your system acts up next season, the conversation starts from what it measured last time, not from what anyone remembers. Service ran on logbooks for a reason, and the reason still holds in a Columbus basement.
Start the conversation the way every job here starts, with a free estimate: free, hassle-free, and no-obligation.