As of Jan 1, 2021: R22 is no longer legal to add to residential or commercial equipment.

Do you know what R-22 is? It is possible that your AC is using R-22 Refrigerant. Why is this important? Because at the end of the year 2020, new R-22 will be completely banned for purchasing, to add to air conditioning units in homes and businesses in the USA according to EPA Rules and Regulations.  You can read about it here.  Email us about your AC to find out if yours uses R-22 for free. Then let us make your unit as reliable as possible so you can continue running it for years. I garantee all parts and labor for two years. As of January 1, 2021 R-22 is unavailable for residential and commercial use.

Important Money Saving Information

Bi-Annual inspections are important for any mechanical device, just like your car needs the oil changed depending on use, Air Conditioners and Furnances too, need to be inspected, lubricated and/or cleaned bi-annually.  In the fall, in preparation for Winter, and in the Spring for preparation of Summer. Don't be caught without whole-house comfort, call Rex to inspect your environmental equipment today.

Rex E. Howell Professional Story

Rex who is Licensed, Bonded, Insured and Claim Free since 1986 is a non-smoker who has been installing, repairing and replacing Air Conditioners, heaters, furnaces, enviornmental cleaners, water heaters and humidifiers for over 45 years. He has worked on nearly every brand of HVAC system sold in the US. He has worked on systems from the Deserts of the Western US to the Blizzards in Colorado. If you would like to know more about Rex and his qualifications, click Rex's Story or just check out our reviews on Home Advisor and Google. We have only recently targetted Google, so our reviews there are few but they are nearly all 5 Star.

Personal Statement to My Clients

As a semi-retired contractor, I enjoy the work I have done since I was out of my teens, I provide quick service to Fort Collins, and Loveland, Colorado as well as Buda, Campion, Elwell, Harmony, Kahler, Kelim, Redmond, Timnath and Trilby Corner.

For a slightly higher fee I also service the following neighbor cities: Adna, Andersonville, Arrowhead, Bellvue, Berthoud, Berts Corner, Black Hollow Junction, Bruce, Bunyan, Cedar Cove, Comer, Dominion, Drake, Elm, Evans, Farmers, Garden City, Gates, Giddings, Gilcrest, Greeley, Hambert, Hardman, Harney, Highland Lake, Hillsboro, Horsetooth Heights, Houston, Hurrich, Hygiene, Idaho Creek, Jessum, Johnstown, Kenyon Corner, Kerns, Kirkland, La Salle, Laporte, Little Dam, Longmont, Lyons, Maloy, Marnett, Masonville, Mead, Milliken, Morey, Mumper Corner, Omega, Peckham,Platteville, Pleasant View Ridge, Pulliam, Rinn,Severance, Waltonia, Welty, Wildcat and Windsor.

Call or text Rex AC at 970-646-3232 for a quick responce and expert service. I offer free estimates on HVAC replacement quotes and free second opinion as to the need to replace your furnace or A/C. Don't live with uncomfortable temperatures in your space, Rex AC is dedicated to ensuring that your home or office is cozy year-round. You can count on RexAC for:

HVAC repair, Furnace Repair, Heater Repair, Air Conditioning Repair, Second Opinion on repair costs, Heat Pump Repair, Forced Air System Repair, Water Heaters, Commercial, Residential and Freezer Repair.Smart thermostat installation, Humidification Installation, Air Quality Equipment Installation Whole house air purifier installation. Advice on proper enviornmental maintenance by end users, as well as; HVAC replacement, Furnace Replacement, Heater Replacement, Air Conditioner Replacement, Second Opinions of need for and estimated cost of replacement. Heat Pump Replacement, Boiler Replacement, Forced Air system Replacement, Fireplace Gas Equipment Replacement

I will analyze your system to pinpoint the exact issue. The diagnostic charge will be applied to the price of repairs if the work is ordered during the initial visit.

I'll provide you with an honest price and never perform unnecessary repairs. I am so confident in my ability to get your unit up and running again that I guarantee my work for two years. Feel comfortable in your home or office again. Schedule an appointment with Rex AC in Loveland, CO now.

Rex's Expertice came from hard work and determination, here is his story:

My career in heating and air conditioning began in 1971, I was nineteen years old. Before I began in the HVAC business, I was working as a maintenance worker for a senior retirement facility in central California. This isn’t the type of retirement facility you may know of today, instead it was a community of high-end manufactured homes laid out in a village-like environment. The maintenance manager was teaching me how to work on large chillers, boilers, room heaters, bath fans, etc. At the time minimum wage was 1.25 per hour. The job had a lot of satisfaction, because I loved visiting with the elderly residents. Many of whom were born before 1900. The stories from people that lived before fuel powered transportation as we know it were amazing. The place where I worked had 26 acres with dozens of Rose gardens. They had many different varieties of Roses, and because my mother’s maiden name was Rose, I really enjoyed working with them, my favorite was the Mr. Lincoln Rose, which is a very deep red and opens to a wide bloom with dozens of petals.

I was earning 1.85, so I felt like I was doing fairly well. In September of 1972 I got married to my girlfriend of 3 years. Then in 1973 I had the opportunity to go to work for a fairly large air conditioning contractor, Johnson Air. They were a dealer for Gaffers and Statler heating and air conditioning units. They were also the local distributor for G&S so they had dozens of units in the warehouse area at all times. They offered to train me, and they would pay me 2.25 per hour to start, so of course I felt this was a good opportunity for me to establish a career, as opposed to just working somewhere for a wage. Coming from a family of 12 children, I always thought I was pretty smart, so I accepted and began immediately.

While I worked there as an installer, I tried hard to learn everything I could about the business of Air Conditioning, not just the installation of ductwork. I was very quickly moved into a field lead position and at the young age of 21 I had a crew of 6 men working under me. I was very opinionated and quality driven, the result of having a father who was somewhat of a perfectionist, if it wasn’t completely right, it was wrong. The way I saw it, the end product had to be as good as I would expect on my own home. I continue to look at my work from that view. Another thing my father taught me was that a job didn’t just have to look like it was good, it had to be good at its core, to this end I was always looking for ways to make our product better, either in efficiency or in the quality of the finished product.

One day I went to the owner and showed him an easy way to make our installs more efficient. He felt that I was young and inexperienced, but having to share everything with eleven siblings had caused me to look at things with the view of measure twice and cut once. Waste was anathema because we couldn’t afford to do things twice. His response was that it would cost him around 15 dollars per job, and that would be thousands of dollars out of his pocket, and for me to continue to do it the way I had been taught. My dad had taught me that if you’re going to do a job, “do it right every time.” not just when someone is looking over your shoulder. When my boss told me that it would cost 15 dollars per home, and that I couldn’t do it. I responded with the only answer I had, “Then, I quit! I will go to work for someone that really believes in quality, and doesn’t just talk big.” He had come to know my work and my work ethic, and quickly changed his mind and said “OK, OK. You can do it on your track of homes, but don’t tell the other lead men.” I told him “The homes that I’m responsible for are the only ones that I care about.”

I watched the men in the shop as they laid out the custom fittings we used, to connect ductwork to the Air Conditioning unit. I was fascinated with the fact that they would cut and bend the metal into the exact shape and size we needed at the construction site, depending on the size of the unit, the pitch of the roof, and the area available to move around in an attic, or under the floors of a building. Fresno is only a forty-five-minute drive to Yosemite, where the pitch of the roofs was quite a bit steeper than those in the city. We did work in the mountain communities near Yosemite, where it snowed a few months of the year, and for the snow to fall off the roof quickly, it had to have a steeper pitch or angle than houses in the desert where it never snowed. I was amazed that all they needed to know was the pitch and height of the roof to make the correct parts.

I had not gone to college, as making a living was much more important than learning things that I might never use. But my mind was always working on finding a better way to do things, and I wanted to know what those layout men knew. During the next year, I would study at night, on my own, on how to lay out sheet metal using triangulation. I modeled specialized fittings out of cardboard, to figure out how the pieces needed to be cut, not only to fit together, but to have the correct amount of overlap so the edges could be formed to make a joint. This required some advanced folding and refolding of the edges, without completely crushing the material together, so that the other pieces could slide into the double folds.

Eventually I got pretty good at knowing how to cut the parts to allow the multiple folds and still have the dimensions come out to what was needed. I felt pretty proud of my efforts, because it was hard earned learning. I would bring my cardboard fittings to work and show them to the boss, hoping to be praised for my efforts. Instead, he told me to stop wasting my time. “You are an installer!” he would exclaim. Most of the layout men had gone through special classes to learn the math needed to properly lay out the structures, and I was trying to do it all by trial and error. He didn’t encourage me at all but I persisted on my own to learn everything I could about everything to do with Air Conditioning and ductwork.

About a year later on a Saturday, I was working overtime and went into the office to find my boss very evidently upset. I asked him “What’s wrong”? He told me with exasperation in his voice, “I’ve got a friend with a Steak House, and he’s having a banquet party of 125 guests tonight, and we didn’t finish installing his Air Conditioner.” I was always willing to go the extra distance in my work and I asked him “what’s left to be done?” He explained that the unit had been set and the attic work was all done, but the transition hardware that directed the air to and from the level air conditioning face to the pitched roof didn’t get built. “All of the fabricators are out of town until Monday.” He lamented, so I told him “Don’t stress, I’ll finish it.” He barked back, “Have you ever built a transition?” I replied “No, but remember the ones I showed you that I built out of cardboard? I can do that in sheet metal as well. He considered and said “well I guess I have no choice, do what you can.”

So I went to the job site and took the required measurements for the needed transition, went back to the shop, laid it out, cut the metal, used the metal brake equipment, which I had very little hands on experience with, bent the metal to make the joints, assembled the transition, insulated it, and went back to the restaurant and installed it. I was able to complete the installation and I fired up the unit about 5:00 pm, so that the restaurant had cooled down nicely by the time his guests began to arrive at 6:00 pm. The average summer day in Fresno runs about 110 degrees and the building was quite warm before I started, but I was determined to show my skills and complete everything, leaving nothing to chance that the evening would be ruined for my employer’s friend. Not long after that, the company that made the air conditioners we installed; Gaffers and Sattler, went out of business and we began selling Tappan air conditioners.

Tappan's product was completely different than those I had learned everything for, but I put the same determination into learning their systems as I had with the G&S brand. That lasted until 1981, when Tappan air conditioning also closed down. My employer then became a dealer for Carrier, at the time one of the high-end systems available. The quality of the Carrier products was much better, so there was more job satisfaction. Did you know that Willis Carrier invented air conditioning in 1902? They are still in business today and they still make a quality product. At this point there was no doubt in my mind that Air Conditioning was my calling in life, and that if I wanted to be more than just an installer, I would have to learn everything I could about the business. During the next year, I began taking refrigeration courses through the mail. “Remember no internet yet. I would read through the material they would send to me and then take the exams and mail them in. The correspondence school, learning through the mail, would grade them and mail me the next section of the course. Before too long I began to understand what until then had been a mystery of how air conditioning actually worked. I was learning the electrical and mechanical framework of the equipment that I had come to love installing.

I learned not only the theory of thermodynamics but the complex play between various sensors, switches, valves, control boards and pumps. This was before we had microchip controlled systems, and the electronic components were often repaired by replacing failed resistors, transistors and other electronic components that until then were simply ELECTRONICS to me. This was when I discovered that most air conditioning systems are built to be fairly fool proof, as long as the electrical circuits are properly set up.

I learned that many problems with heating and cooling systems have more to do with being properly installed, and less to do with the quality of the equipment from the factory when it comes to failure. If I had only taken refrigeration training, instead of the full HVAC series of courses, I wouldn’t have been able to understand that. I am forever thankful of the training that Mr. Johnson provided to me at a young age, but I felt that I could do better if allowed to do so. In 1976 I took a job with another company and very quickly advanced to foreman, replacing a man that had been the foreman for a while, but he couldn’t do sheet metal layout.

Here is where my studies come into play again. Education is power. The company was setting hundreds of rooftop units a month, but, they had three different sizes of roof set-ups to deal with the three different size units that set on the roof, depending on the size of the dwelling. I told the owner, “you know if we built our roof ells with transitioning sides, called drop-cheek elbows, we could do all of our rough-ins with one size roof jack. This would eliminate having to worry which roof jack went on which house.” He looked at me and said “You can do that’? I said sure. He was very happy. This saved thousands of dollars per year. Also, if a homeowner wanted to increase the size of their unit, no sheet metal changes would be required.

After about three years, the owner decided to sell his business and retire. The new owner was all about saving money over proper installation techniques and I didn’t have a good feeling about this, so I went back to work for Mr. Johnson at Johnson Air. In 1981, the service manager left and I began to fill in. The correspondence courses in HVAC I had taken also covered business practices, and I had learned a lot about the psychology and practicality of billing for services and work done. When I returned to Johnson Air, the process used to calculate a job were very cumbersome. We would charge a service fee, a mileage fee, and we had to track our time and bill the hourly rate based on who the customer was, marking up the price of a part from a sliding scale, and then add the tax, calculate the amount of time the repair or installation would take and then calculate the total. All of this took away from actual working time. I realized that each of our technicians were spending ten to twenty minutes just calculating the bill, and despite this, most of them would come to a similar amount for the same job type. With most variation being the time to complete the job.

I began making a book with all of the common repairs pre-priced. This is known as flat rate, or menu-based pricing. It wasn’t very popular with Mr. Johnson in 1981, or with many other businesses, but it has since become the standard way of doing service work for many industries. It was a fairer method for the paying customer, since different customers weren’t being charged for the time when a technician had to run after missing or forgotten parts. The focus of making money moved from charging customers for chasing parts and pushed for preparing the supplies kept on the service trucks to the technicians. I also talked Mr. Johnson into allowing the offer of Senior and Veteran discounts. I quadrupled the service department size in just four short years. And the business was finally making a profit with much less effort and time spent in preparation as technicians learned to keep their trucks stocked with the most commonly used components.

Early in 1985, my father passed away at 66 years old. This was hard for me to get over. I kind-of lost my drive to do everything for everybody else. After all, I was my father’s favorite. Do you think he told that to all 12 of us kids? Now, where was I to go for all of life’s answers? Well I was 33 years old, so I figured it was time that I grew up. I began thinking about starting my own business and after some thought, decided it was where I needed to be. Later that year I gave notice to my employer. I told him I would stay on for four months to allow time to find my replacement. I borrowed 14,000 dollars against our home and started REHCO Air in October 1985. REHCO stood for Rex E. Howell Company. That first year I worked alone, doing all the work myself.

The next year, I began to get more work than I could handle and hired my younger brother, Frank to help me. I paced our work, accepting only those jobs I knew we two could handle and once it became clear that I could put other people to work, as I had built a very good reputation, I continued to grow my business at a preplanned amount each year. By 2003 I had 25 employees and my own crane service, which my older brother ran for me. We ran 15 service trucks, four installers, and 6 people running the office. We had a local company offered to buy us out, but it was all talk, and no truth. We went into contract with him, but the payments never came. That set us back financially. After that, it seemed like my health began to decline. It seemed like it was all on me, with no support from anyone. In march of 2008 I had a major heart attack. It seemed like it would take forever to recover. When I finally went back to work, I was weak. I couldn’t let anyone know. I would climb the ladder, and had to wait till I had the strength to step over to the roof. When I had to come back down off of the roof, it would take me some time to climb from the roof to the ladder. I am still cautious to this day when I’m on a ladder. In 2018 I went to Downtown Healthcare Clinic in Denver Colorado and had Stem Cell treatments and now I feel twenty years younger.

In 2009 I came to Loveland Colorado. I got my license here, and opened my Air Conditioning and Heating business. I continued to go back and forth to California for several years, until I could finally call Loveland my home. My Grandfather homesteaded in Colorado Springs in 1890 where my father was born in 1918, so for me this feels like home. I bought an old home on 1st street that was built in 1908. I fixed it up, sold it, and bought a more modern home at the north end of Loveland. Most of the work I do is in Loveland, Fort Collins, Windsor, and Greeley. I enjoy solving problems. I don’t have all the answers, but I know where to find them. I still have many friends in other states that will call me with heater or air conditioning problems. I will get the brand and model from them, and help them solve the problem over the phone. Recently, I solved a problem on the VA Hospital that had been going on for 20 years. They were planning to replace a Twenty Ton system on the Lab, but once I corrected the installation problems that had haunted them for so long, they were able to put that on hold and they were very happy. In 2018 I partnered with the Children’s Hospital of Colorado where I allowed people who donated to the Children’s Hospital to apply their donation to their bill with me. I still offer military and elderly discounts for all my customers who qualify. When it came time to build a website, I chose the web address www.rexac.co to help my customers understand that I now concentrate on Colorado.

EPA R-22 Phaseout 2020