About Kaw Valley Heating & Cooling
This company started at a breakfast table. On a Saturday morning in 1979, Onis Lemon, a bank loan officer, sat down with a technician named Bob Reed, and by the time the plates were cleared, the two of them had decided to start a heating and cooling company in Topeka. Onis brought the financing. Bob brought the trade, and with it a standard about how a customer ought to be treated. That standard is still the thing this company is built on.
In the fifty years since, most HVAC companies in this area have changed hands, changed names, or closed. Kaw Valley has stayed in the same family. That is not just a nice fact about us. It means the technician diagnosing your furnace has likely worked on that model in that neighborhood before, and that the company standing behind a system we install today is the same one that installed systems here in the 1980s and is still answering for them.
Still Run by the Family
In May 2018, Onis’s son David Lemon took over the business with his wife Jody, and they run it today. Their son Tyler and his wife, Ansley, work in operations. Krista, another daughter-in-law, works in the office. When a customer calls with a problem that needs an owner’s attention, the owner is the person who picks it up.
That is not a marketing arrangement. It changes what the job looks like. There is no regional office setting quotas, no script a technician has to follow, and nobody who benefits from selling a homeowner a system they do not need. The family’s name is on the van, and in a town this size, that is its own kind of accountability.
What We Are Actually For
Kaw Valley exists to protect the comfort, health, and budgets of our neighbors. That is the whole mission, and the three parts of it carry equal weight. Comfort means a house that holds its temperature through a Kansas August and a January cold snap. Health means the air inside that house is clean and the equipment burning gas in it is safe. Budget means we do not spend your money on work your system does not need.
The values underneath that are simple enough to say out loud: comfort, integrity, community, skill, safety, and staying local. Most companies list something similar. The difference shows up in what we do when a repair is not worth making.
The Honesty Part
You get the price before we start, not after we finish. If a repair costs more than the system is worth, we will tell you, even when the replacement would be the bigger invoice for us. And if a technician looks at your unit and finds it does not need the work you called about, that is what you will hear.
This is the single most common thing homeowners are worried about when they call an HVAC company, and most of the industry handles it by asking to be trusted rather than by saying what it will do. We would rather say it.
The People Who Come to Your Door
There are 21 of us. Every technician is background-checked before he ever drives a company van, because a stranger walking through your house on a Tuesday afternoon is a different kind of decision than picking a contractor from a search result.
We also expect our technicians to be able to explain what they found without making anyone feel talked down to. A homeowner who understands why a capacitor failed makes better decisions about the rest of the system, and a technician who cannot explain it usually does not fully understand it either.
Built for Kansas Houses
A Topeka August will run a condenser hard for six weeks straight, and then a January cold snap asks a furnace to do the opposite job with no recovery time in between. Equipment here does not get an easy season. That is why roughly 95% of what we install is high-efficiency, and why we push maintenance harder than most companies do. It is not an upsell. It is what the climate here does to machinery.
We work across Topeka, Lawrence, Hoyt, Silver Lake, Rossville, Carbondale, Holton, and St. Marys. Those are short drives and repeat customers, which means we see the same neighborhoods, the same housing stock, and often the same systems over their whole service life.
Part of This Community
Local media has had Dave on to talk about heating and cooling more than once, including a FOX 43 AM Live segment. We answer questions on those shows the same way we answer them at a kitchen table, because the neighbors watching are the same people who call us.
We also take 10% off for first responders, EMTs, firefighters, police officers, and military members. It is not a promotion we rotate out. It stays.
Why Families Call Us Back
New installations carry a 10-year parts and labor warranty, which is a longer commitment than most companies in this market will make and a reason we are careful about what we put in. Someone answers the phone around the clock. We are BBB-accredited, NATE-certified, and a Housecall Pro Verified Partner, and our customers rate us five stars on Google.
None of that is the reason people stay, though. They stay because somebody told them the truth about their furnace once, and they remembered.
Come Find Out
Whether it is a system that quit last night or a replacement you have been putting off for two summers, call us or fill out the form. You will get a straight answer about what your house actually needs, and no pressure attached to it.
