Twenty-six questions.

We design, build, and tune precision HVAC for collections — museums, archives, libraries, private collectors, historic-house museums, and the rare commercial client (auction house, conservation lab, gallery) whose climate brief looks like a cultural-heritage brief. We work in five protocols: Class AA galleries, cold and cool storage, private collections, historic-building retrofit, and touring-exhibit compliance.

Residential HVAC except for private collections. Commercial-office and retail HVAC. Restaurant kitchen ventilation. Industrial-process refrigeration or refrigeration for grocery and food service. Same-day or same-week emergency response for properties we have never seen. Bidding against general contractors on price-led RFPs. Cleanrooms for semiconductor or pharmaceutical — we do conservation cleanrooms only, which are a different problem.

Yes. Pittsburgh, Allegheny County, Beaver, Butler, Westmoreland, Washington, and Greene counties under standard contract; statewide and into Ohio, West Virginia, and western New York under retainer; anywhere in the lower 48 for emergency loan-condition compliance during a touring exhibition. We have not yet worked outside the United States.

We will work alongside a GC where the project is large enough to warrant one, and we will subcontract heavy ductwork, structural penetrations, and steamfitter scopes to GC-approved trades. We will not bid as the M of an MEP scope on a price-led RFP. The dimensions an RFP rewards (lowest bid, fastest schedule, most-similar-prior) are not the dimensions on which we compete; if your project is being procured that way, hire someone else.

A typical institutional gallery retrofit lands between $480,000 and $1.4M total construction, with engineering and commissioning at 9–14% on top. A typical private-collection project lands at $35,000–$140,000. A historic-retrofit project ranges much more widely — $80,000 for a single-room parish archive to $4.2M for a full-building Class-B regime in a Carnegie-era branch library. Cold-storage vaults run $42,000–$340,000 depending on size and target setpoint. Standing-watch retainers (Gate M6) run $5,400–$64,000 per year per site.

Gate M1 + M2 (walk and risk register) is four weeks. Gate M3 (mechanical schematic) is three to six weeks. Gate M4 (build) is four to fourteen months. Gate M5 (equilibration) is two weeks to eighteen months. Gate M6 (standing watch) is ongoing. The whole sequence on an institutional gallery project is typically eight to fourteen months. Historic retrofits take twelve to thirty-six months. The longest project we have run was thirty months from M1 to commissioned (case 031).

Because the equilibration is long. The mechanical can be built in months. The collection’s acclimatization to the new envelope takes longer, often considerably longer. We have written about this in Class AA and case 031. Equilibration ramp rate is the practice’s single non-negotiable schedule constraint.

Time-and-materials punishes diligent scoping and rewards padded hours. Fixed-price by gate forces us to put a price on each deliverable — which forces us to be honest about what each deliverable involves. Read the protocols page for the gate-by-gate price ranges.

The first call is usually 30 to 45 minutes, generally with Petra. We ask: what is the collection, what is the building, what is the budget, what is the timeline, who else is involved (a conservator, a GC, an architect, a lender on a loan agreement). We do not propose anything on the first call. We typically follow up with a written scope summary the next business day.

Fill out the Begin intake form. It takes about 14 minutes — longer than most contact forms because we ask for what we’ll need anyway. Or call +1 (412) 555-0148, 8:00–17:30 ET. We respond inside two business days.

New work begins about 90 days after intake on average. Sometimes sooner; rarely much later. We accept three to five new institutional projects a year and a small handful of new private retainers. Touring-exhibit compliance can be picked up inside ten business days if the loan agreement is already signed.

Yes — routinely for private clients, and for institutional clients on request. We hold a standard mutual NDA we are happy to send; we are also happy to sign a client’s NDA if it is not asymmetric or unusually broad. We do not sign agreements that prohibit us from naming the work in aggregate (e.g. “a Squirrel Hill rowhouse with Audubon plates”) without identifying the client.

LoRaWAN signal propagates through masonry buildings considerably better than Wi-Fi, and runs on a separate spectrum from the building’s IT infrastructure. The building’s IT department’s firewall does not break our sensor mesh. We piloted four other vendors in 2018; Conserv won. Jules has the long-form answer.

Because his 2007 Getty paper is the single most-useful piece of writing on conservation HVAC ever published. We have not yet found a paper that supersedes it. If you find one, please tell us.

Yes — we run WUFI for hygrothermal wall analysis on every historic retrofit, and EnergyPlus for whole-building energy modeling on projects above ~10,000 ft². Modeling is included in Gate M2 for projects that warrant it.

Sloane is LEED AP BD+C. We have delivered LEED Silver and Gold projects but we do not pursue certifications as an end in themselves. The carbon math we do is in the binder regardless of whether the building is going for a plaque.

Yes — that is Protocol V. We have done this for thirty-four loans across eleven host institutions since 2018.

If you are the lender, yes — we will write language that we know how to enforce. If you are the borrower, we can review proposed language and tell you what it will cost to deliver. Either is a small engagement; both are billed against an hourly engagement rate.

Because the work is. Read the colophon for the technical answer.

The journal, the casebook, the glossary, and the references page. The shop library is also browsable in person if you visit; see visit.