Lighthouse Park cottages and Marsh Creek fairways: the island's two ages of equipment

Age tells us what to expect before we knock

Our dispatcher can guess the call from the street name. A Lighthouse Park address usually means a small frame or masonry cottage from the 1920s through the 1950s, under heavy oak canopy near the 1874 lighthouse, with either a ductless system someone added in the last decade or no central cooling at all. A Marsh Creek address means a stucco home from the mid-1990s to mid-2000s behind a gate, on a fairway or the marsh, with a split system that is on its second or third round of equipment and its first round of ductwork.

Those are different jobs, and this page is about both.

Under the lighthouse

Lighthouse Park grew up around the light station on the east side of Salt Run and has been proposed as a historic district for good reason: it still looks like the beach village it was. The cottages are small, the lots are shaded, and the oaks drop more on a condenser in a month than an inland unit sees in a year. Many of the older homes went straight from window units to ductless heads, skipping ductwork entirely, which is the right call in a house with eight-foot ceilings and no attic to speak of.

The calls we get here are first-time installs for owners renovating a cottage, single ductless heads that have stopped communicating, and humidity complaints in houses that sit low near Salt Run where the air never really dries out. For the humidity we look at head sizing first. An oversized ductless head short-cycles exactly the way an oversized central unit does.

On the fairways

Marsh Creek is the only golf-course community on the island, gated, built in the 1990s and early 2000s, with larger two-story homes and a lot of lanais and pool cages. The equipment that came with these houses is mostly gone. What remains original is the ductwork in the attic, and that is where a lot of the current complaints live: an upstairs that will not hold temperature, a return that was undersized for the replacement system, flex duct that has been crushed by two decades of cable installers and Christmas boxes.

The repair-or-replace decision shows up here constantly. A 2009 system with a leaking coil, a 2004 system on a refrigerant that is getting expensive, a 2015 system that is fine but attached to a duct system that is not. We quote the repair, and when the math says so, the replacement next to it, with the duct work priced as its own line so you can see what each buys.

Across SR 312

Anastasia Island is 38 minutes from Cook’s shop at 37 Fairmont Ln in Palm Coast by US 1 and the SR 312 bridge, a little less to the south end and a little more to Lighthouse Park when the Bridge of Lions traffic backs up Anastasia Boulevard. Gate codes for Marsh Creek go in the customer file. Twenty-four-hour dispatch, one price at any hour.