A Lansing name since 1987

Dale Kestler grew up in the business. His father started Kestler Heating & Cooling in 1987 out of a single truck, and Dale spent his school breaks handing his dad tools in basements all over the south side of Lansing. He has spent close to thirty years in the trade now, and he took over the company with one rule in mind: tell people the truth about their heat, even when the truth costs you the sale.

That rule is why Kestler techs do not work on commission and why every price is quoted flat, before the wrench comes out. Dale would rather fix a furnace than replace one, and he would rather lose a job than scare a family into buying equipment they do not need. He runs the shop the way his father did, on repeat customers and word of mouth, because in a town this size your reputation walks in the door before you do.

Dale is a licensed mechanical contractor and holds an EPA 608 certification. When he is not on a call, he is usually training a younger tech or arguing with a supplier about lead times.

Sam Reyburn runs the service side of Kestler, which means when your furnace quits at six in the morning, Sam is the one deciding whose truck gets to you first. She has been diagnosing heating and cooling systems for over twenty years, and there is not much she has not seen come out of a Lansing basement.

Sam is the person who trained half the techs on the crew, and she trained them the way Dale wanted: show the customer the actual problem, explain it in plain words, and let them decide. She is unusually good at the hard conversations, the ones where a repair does not make sense anymore, because she has learned that people can handle bad news fine as long as it comes straight.

Sam holds a mechanical contractor license and an EPA 608 certification. She keeps the schedule honest, which is her polite way of saying she will not let anyone overbook a day just to squeeze in one more call.

Tonya Whitcomb leads Kestler's installation crew, and if you get a new furnace or air conditioner from us, odds are Tonya sized it and stood in your basement while it went in. She is meticulous about the parts of an install that nobody sees: the ductwork, the airflow, the load calculation that decides whether your equipment runs easy or fights itself for fifteen years.

She came up through the trade doing new construction before moving to residential replacement, where she found she liked the puzzle of making modern equipment work in old Lansing houses. A lot of comfort problems that look like a broken furnace are really a bad install from years back, and Tonya takes a quiet pride in doing the job so it never becomes somebody else's headache.

Tonya is a licensed mechanical contractor with an EPA 608 certification. She is the one on the crew most likely to catch the detail that would have caused a callback, which is exactly why Dale put her in charge of installs.

Curtis Vale is the person you sit down with when it is time to replace a system, and his job is the one most likely to be done badly at other companies. A comfort advisor at a lot of shops is really just a salesperson on commission. Curtis is not. He walks your house, runs the numbers, and lays out honest options, including the option to repair what you have and wait.

He spent years on the service truck before moving to the advising side, so when he talks about why a furnace is failing or what size AC your house actually needs, it comes from having done the work, not from a brochure. He is patient with questions and he will happily talk you out of the expensive choice if the expensive choice is wrong for you.

Curtis holds an EPA 608 certification. His measure of a good day is a customer who understood every option in front of them and never felt pushed toward any of them.

Patty Kestler-Dunn keeps the whole operation running, and as Dale's sister she has been around the family business nearly as long as he has. She is the voice most customers hear first, the one who answers the phone when your heat is out and gets a truck headed your way without making you feel like a ticket number.

Patty runs scheduling, billing, and the steady communication that makes working with a service company feel orderly instead of stressful. She is the reason a Kestler invoice matches the quote, because she tracks every job so the number you were told up front is the number you pay. If something is going to run late, she calls you before you have to call her.

She built the office side of Kestler around a simple idea her father drilled into both of them: people remember how you treated them when something broke. Patty makes sure that memory is a good one, which is a big part of why families here have used Kestler for two generations.