OUR STORY

Thirteen years keeping a hospital cold, now spent keeping Dallas houses comfortable Craig Sandoval did not come to this city's trade through a service department, a sales floor, or a family trade. He came through a plant room. For thirteen years, from 2009 to 2022, he worked in facilities engineering at a large Dallas hospital campus, hired as a night-shift plant operator and ending as the facilities engineer responsible for the central plant, the chillers, cooling towers, and air handlers serving operating suites, imaging suites, isolation rooms, and the wards and offices stacked around them, where a unit that trips does not produce an uncomfortable afternoon: it produces a page, a log entry, and a root-cause note with a name on it. He started watching machines while the city slept and ended accountable for the whole plant's readings. That work teaches a man to read hours and redundancy, and it teaches him just as clearly where his reading stops. Plant work teaches the failure calendar of workload: which chillers die at the end of long hot hauls, how a machine sounds in its last honest run, why the hours predict the fault better than the fault explains itself. What it leaves untaught is the whole second trade: what a house does to machinery. Craig moved across the fence in 2022, when the health system outsourced its plant operations and offered him the desk that manages the contract, a job made of vendor reports instead of readings. He declined it and spent the summer and fall riding the peak weeks as an on-call troubleshooter for two Dallas-area install shops, learning attic heat, duct runs, zones, and loads that come through two stories of glass. The lessons arrived as corrections. A house is not a plant room. Its failures arrive as comfort complaints, not alarms, and its single system has no understudy standing valved and ready behind it. In 2023 he founded Dallas Air Care in Garland as a repair company built on that translation: plant reading for the workload, house reading for everything the workload runs through. The theory tested well. Felix Andrade joined at the founding in 2023 from nine years as a commercial electrician in the towers along Central Expressway. Marta Ellison took over the phone and the map the same year, after eleven years dispatching for a Dallas elevator service company, where a stalled car and a dead air conditioner were the same phone call in different clothes. Three people. Two trucks. One side of a metroplex, read by the hour. The name carries the city's name in it, plainly. The record should note plainly that this metroplex has other near names in it: an energy-upgrade company trades as DFW Air Care from Uptown and lists our towns as its areas served, an HVAC and appliance house holding Air Care in the middle of its name has traded in Dallas since 1974, and the bare name Air Care trades actively on the metroplex's other side. We use our full name, we answer for our own work, and we let the hours record make the argument.