As I’m waiting to make the right turn onto the I-440 East ramp, I happened to notice that this particular mail van is delivering a bit more than the usual pile of bills and junk mail.
I love it that this particular carrier managed to requisition a decent sense of humour which is decidedly lacking in the ones that tend to “service” my address.
Goodness knows I needed it this morning after an evening enjoying way lower temperatures in the house than is usual thanks to an A/C unit that is completely and utterly buggered as I would find out about 90 minutes after this photo was snapped.
Mind you, I already knew I was pretty much hosed when the simple fix of changing the filters didn’t stop the behaviour of when the thermostat would try to kick the outside unit, the breaker in the garage would immediately trip.
I thought about perhaps replacing the run capacitor but when all of the other possibilities for that behaviour usually mean the outside unit is mostly if not all dead, I didn’t see a whole lot of sense spending on a run capacitor just to find I’m totally screwed anyway and a new unit will come with a brand-new run capacitor anyway.
Of course, even in death the damned thing has to be an overachiever. NOOOOOO….it couldn’t be just the compressor *OR* the motor. Power was coming in nicely and coming out the other side and neither of them decided to do anything.
This is very definitely on the “ALL DEAD” end of the scale. 🙁
Fortunately, Jason of Wake Heating and Air came highly recommended as being excellent at being honest and he soon put me out of the misery of thinking there was any hope of resurrecting the existing system which to be fair lasted ten years with fairly heavy use, particularly in summer. The days of the “my last unit lasted 30 years” has long since been gone…sadly.
What I really liked about Jason was that he took the time to explain his reasoning behind the things that he wants to do and why he’s really not into doing a half-assed job to just have to come back and mess with it again. Nor was he into the sell everything under the sun thing which is what I’ve hated about the people who installed the system originally and people like them.
We ended up independently coming to the same conclusion…other than the thermostat controls, there’s really nothing truly worth saving in the existing system which has always struggled in winter and has never been able to heat both floors simultaneously.
So yes…it’s going to be an ugly number. A really ugly one…and that right on top of having to replace a ceiling fan and three light switches as well as the rest of the home maintenance misery that has come with 2020.
But the silver lining is that for the first time, this house will actually have a system capable of properly heating both floors at the same time and a more efficient heat pump outside should make a decent saving on the electric bills.
This one hurts.
But it could have been worse. Much worse. Like in the middle of summer during a heat wave with a son who is seizure prone dealing with an AC fault which of course decided to happen on a weekend meaning that getting it sorted which was already going to be a royal screwing had penalty fees piled on the top of that.
Been there, done that. And that’s why those bastards have never been invited back!