Meet the Team - Dalton Heating & Air Hempstead

Meet the Hempstead Team Behind Dalton Heating & Air Hempstead

Every call we run in Hempstead, Uniondale, Garden City, and the surrounding neighborhoods gets answered by a real person and assigned to a technician who actually lives in this trade, not someone reading a script from a tablet. Our crew is small on purpose. That means the person who shows up at your door has a name you’ll recognize on the second visit, knows the difference between a 1920s boiler in a colonial on Fulton Street and a newer heat pump in a split-level off Peninsula Boulevard, and answers to Marco Benitez directly. No dispatcher roulette, no faceless subcontractor. Just the same four or five faces, year after year.

Call (516) 559-4840

Our People

Mike R. – Lead Technician

Mike has been turning wrenches on residential HVAC systems for 19 years, the last eight of them in Hempstead and the Nassau County belt. He holds his EPA 608 certification for refrigerant handling and is factory-trained on Carrier, Trane, Lennox, Goodman, Rheem, York, Daikin, Bryant, and American Standard equipment. If your furnace is short-cycling, Mike will explain the flame sensor issue in plain English, show you the part, and have the repair priced in writing before he touches anything. He keeps a small notebook in the van with drawings of odd wiring setups he’s found in older Hempstead homes, which his wife calls his “technician sketchbook.” He’d rather eat the notebook than admit it’s saved a job more than once.

Dana S. – Senior Installer

Dana leads the install side of the business and has been doing full system replacements for 14 years. She specializes in heat pump installation and ducted-to-ductless conversions, which means she’s the one who figures out how to get modern equipment into homes with tight basements and Victorian-era framing without turning the project into a renovation. Dana’s background includes factory training on three major brands, and she handles the load calculation on every replacement so the price reflects actual heating and cooling demand, not a guess from a square-footage chart. People ask if she misses working on commercial rooftops. She says residential installs are better because she gets to see the finished result change how a family lives, and because the coffee is better. She is exact about her tools and about the cleanup afterward, which is why you’ll never find a stray screw or a strip of leftover foil tape after her crew leaves.

Pete L. – Service Coordinator

Pete is the voice on the phone. He has been with Dalton Heating & Air Hempstead for six years and runs the schedule from the office in Hempstead, not a call center in another state. When you call (516) 559-4840 at 2 a.m. because the heat quit in February, Pete is who answers, notes the address, asks what the thermostat reads, and tells you which technician is on the way and when. He grew up in Nassau County and knows the difference between a street in Hempstead village and one in West Hempstead, which means he can route calls without a second round of questions. Pete keeps a laminated map of the service area marked with the usual traffic snarls. He says the third-worst part of the job is February. The second is August. The first is when someone’s boiler from 1985 somehow still runs and the homeowner apologizes for calling, as if the thing running for 40 years is their fault.

Luis C. – Apprentice Technician

Luis joined the crew two years ago and works alongside Mike on service calls and Dana on installs. He’s working toward his EPA certification now, which means he handles the non-refrigerant side of repairs under supervision: testing capacitors, cleaning condensate lines, replacing contactors, and running the vacuum pump on install day. Luis came from a facilities maintenance background, so he already knew how to diagnose a seized blower motor before he learned the refrigeration cycle. Marco Benitez, Owner, says Luis has the best safety habits of any apprentice he’s trained, which is exactly what you want from the person holding the ladder and the meter. Outside of work, Luis restores old radios. He says it’s the same kind of patience as troubleshooting a control board, except the parts smell like dust and solder instead of refrigerant.

One Standard, Every Job

Every technician at Dalton Heating & Air Hempstead works under The Garrison Standard, and that standard is not a slogan. It’s a list of non-negotiable rules. The price goes in writing before any work starts, every time, no exceptions. The repair gets a written guarantee on the spot, and that guarantee covers a full year, not 30 days. If the repair fails inside that year, we come back at no charge. That’s the 365-Day Done Right Promise, and it applies whether Luis is changing a capacitor or Mike is replacing a heat exchanger. The team also follows The Garrison Code on every visit: arrive inside the stated window, do the job by the book, leave the site clean, and stand behind the work. Marco Benitez enforces that code personally. He’s been with the Garrison Partners network since 2003, and the Hempstead location runs the same way every day. Background-checked, uniformed, factory-trained people show up on time, tell you the truth about what the equipment needs, and write it all down before they start. No games. No pressure. Just the job, done right, with a name you know.

Written by Marco Benitez, Owner at Dalton Heating & Air Hempstead, serving Hempstead and the surrounding Nassau County neighborhoods since 2003.