When the Blue Crab Festival opens, cooling season has already started

The weekend the season turns

By the time the Blue Crab Festival tents go up at Riverfront Park on Memorial Day weekend, afternoon highs in Palatka have been above 85 for a couple of weeks and the humidity off the St. Johns has settled in for the next four months. That weekend is when the first real wave of calls comes in from Putnam County: systems that limped through April on a weak capacitor, condensate lines that scaled shut over a winter of well water, a heat pump on a manufactured home across the river that was never quite matched to the ducts under it.

The decision that weekend forces is simple: have the system looked at in the Azalea Festival stretch of March, or have it looked at after it quits, at whatever hour it chooses. We do both and would rather do the first.

Houses that have outlived several air conditioners

Putnam County’s housing is among the oldest in this part of Florida, with a median build year near 1972. In Palatka that shows up as four very different kinds of work.

The late-1800s and early-1900s frame homes of the Palatka North Historic District and the South Historic District around The Hammock were built for shade and cross-breezes, not ducts. Many still cool with window units or a ductless head tucked onto a side porch, and the right answer is often another head rather than tearing into lath and plaster.

The small block houses in Newtown, Palatka Heights and along the US 17 corridor date mostly from the 1950s through the 70s. Their systems are typically on a third or fourth replacement, and the ducts underneath are usually the part nobody has touched.

Manufactured and mobile homes make up close to half the housing in parts of the county. Package units, crawlspace moisture and undersized ducts are the everyday problems there.

And then there is the river. Equipment near the St. Johns, Dunns Creek and Crescent Lake has been through Irma and Ian, and some of it is running on borrowed time.

How a Palm Coast company covers Palatka

Our headquarters and dispatch sit at 37 Fairmont Ln in Palm Coast, about 35 miles and 51 minutes from downtown Palatka by way of SR 100. We do not pretend to have a storefront on St. Johns Avenue. What we have is a routed schedule that keeps trucks in Putnam County on a regular rhythm, with maintenance in Interlachen and Satsuma grouped alongside repairs in town.

Cook’s is family-owned. Jerry handles system sales and sizing; Sean leads the technicians. We are a Lennox dealer, and for repairs we work on Carrier, Bryant, Trane and whatever else is already in your closet or on your pad. Residential and commercial both, from a cottage in Pomona Park to rooftop units above the St. Johns Avenue storefronts.

Call 866-266-5709

What this climate asks of a system

Palatka runs a degree or two hotter than the coast in July, with mean highs around 92 and humidity that makes a house feel sticky whatever the thermostat says. Winters bring a dozen or so light freezes, enough to find out whether a heat pump’s auxiliary heat works. Add February-to-May oak and pine pollen, dust from the mill and the sand plants toward Grandin, and summer lightning on rural power lines, and you have a climate that is hard on filters, coils and control boards. Our work is organized around that: coil and drain care twice a year, surge protection on new installs, equipment sized to the house, and an honest repair-versus-replace conversation.