The short version
Charlie is the owner of ARP Heat And Air. He founded the company in 2010 and has held an active Oklahoma HVAC contractor license (OK CIB #00125054) continuously since 2011. He's EPA Section 608 Universal certified for refrigerant handling. He personally does or leads most installations and service calls we run in Edmond, Oklahoma City, Norman, Moore, Yukon, and surrounding cities.
There is no call center between you and him. There is no "comfort advisor" who visits in a polo shirt to size you up before any technician looks at your system. When you want a quote, Charlie visits. When you need service, Charlie comes or a tech he personally trained does. The business structure is deliberately small because the quality of a small HVAC shop is bottlenecked by how much of the work the owner can personally supervise — past a certain growth point, quality degrades. We've chosen not to cross that point.
Credentials
Everything below can be independently verified — see our Trust page for the lookup links and verification steps.
- Oklahoma HVAC LicenseOK CIB #00125054
- License statusActive, continuous since 2011
- EPA Section 608Universal certified
- Liability insuranceCurrent, COI available
- Surety bondCurrent (CIB requirement)
- Google rating5.0 ★ with 111+ reviews
- Years in the trade15+
Technical specialties — what Charlie is actually good at
Every HVAC technician has areas of particular depth. Here are the ones Charlie has developed over 15+ years of Oklahoma residential work:
Manual J load calculations for mixed-era housing stock
Oklahoma's metro housing stock ranges from 1900s Mesta Park bungalows to 2024 Castlewood Trails new builds. Equipment sizing that works on one doesn't work on the other. Charlie runs Manual J on every install where sizing isn't obviously a same-size swap — this takes about 45 minutes per home, produces a written report, and is the single biggest difference between a system that performs for 15 years and a system that fails at 8. Most Oklahoma HVAC contractors skip this step. Charlie doesn't.
Historic-home retrofit work
Heritage Hills, Mesta Park, Crown Heights, Campus Corner in Norman, Edmond's University District — these are homes that were built before central AC existed, and installing modern equipment in them correctly requires understanding both historic construction and modern HVAC. Charlie has worked in dozens of these homes and knows when the honest answer is "ductless mini-split, not central AC" — and will say so, even though it's sometimes a smaller-revenue install.
Refrigerant transition management (R-410A → R-454B)
The EPA phase-down of R-410A started January 2025. From 2026 forward, every new system ships with a low-GWP refrigerant — usually R-454B (mildly flammable, A2L classification, requires updated clearance practices) or R-32. Handling this transition safely and legally requires current certifications and awareness of updated ASHRAE 15 clearance standards. Charlie has been tracking this since the original phase-out schedule was announced.
Post-2013 Moore rebuild-era equipment patterns
The 2013 Moore tornado rebuild created an unusual concentration of homes with HVAC equipment all installed within a narrow window (2013–2016), all hitting first-major-failure age at roughly the same time. Charlie has worked enough Moore installs to recognize the specific failure patterns of the builder-grade equipment common to that era, which means Moore homeowners get a better-informed quote than they'd get from a contractor who hasn't seen the pattern.
Ductwork static pressure diagnosis
When a system underperforms, the problem is usually not the equipment — it's the ductwork. Charlie diagnoses static pressure on every estimate where airflow seems suspect. This isn't billable work; it's part of the quote. A lot of homeowners have been sold expensive high-efficiency equipment by contractors who never measured the duct system it's being installed into. Charlie won't do that.
What Charlie doesn't do
Being honest about specialties means being honest about what's outside them:
- Geothermal. There's a small but growing geothermal market in the OKC metro. We're not a geothermal specialist. We'll refer you to someone who is.
- Large commercial rooftop work. We do light commercial (small offices, retail under ~5,000 sq ft). We don't do industrial rooftop systems or VRF-scale buildings.
- Solar-hybrid or battery-integrated HVAC. Some newer OKC builds have solar + battery. We can work around these systems but we're not the installer for them.
- High-volume production installs. We do 1–3 installs a day maximum. If you want a 6-AM-to-9-PM crew crunching through three jobs in a day, that's not what Charlie is building.
Why "the owner is the technician" matters
Most HVAC companies of any scale split the quote and the install across different people. A salesperson visits your home, quotes the job, and hands it to a scheduling coordinator who dispatches a field tech. The salesperson is incentivized to close the sale; the tech is incentivized to finish the install and move to the next one. Communication between them is mediated by a work order. Anything the salesperson didn't write down — observations about your ductwork, concerns about electrical, caveats about brand selection — gets lost.
When the owner is the technician, that handoff doesn't happen. What Charlie promises on the quote is what Charlie delivers on the install day, because Charlie is the one doing both. This is not a business innovation; it's how trades worked for hundreds of years before call centers got invented. It just feels unusual today because it's gotten rare.
Ask Charlie directly
If you have questions — about your specific home, about a quote you received from another contractor, about which brand is right, about whether you should repair or replace — call and ask. No obligation, no pressure, no sales pitch. If the answer takes 5 minutes, it takes 5 minutes. If you need a full in-home estimate after the call, we'll schedule one.