Went out to eat last night just after the ac was fixed—to let the place cool down.
Swinging Door has a nice addition to the menu: monster baseball hot dogs, and the Mariner Dog is a chili dog, which is very good.
It was real good to wake to cold air this morning.
Cost us about 300.00 instead of the mammoth bill it could have been. The compressor is fine, and the good news is the system is one of the intermediate-modern ones, so if it does have to be replaced, it will be easier than if it were one of the old freon sort. Even so, they’ve now gone over to something else. And the refrigerant is still evolving.
LINK TO ARTICLE ON UPCOMING AC CHANGES
I think we will wait, hope this repair holds until 2020, and, because an AC replacement DURING summer heat is a pita involving many delays and a lot of sweating, maybe figure that in 6 more years our ac system will have reached a reasonable retirement and just schedule a replacement we can save up for.
As it was, the compressor seems fine and the new fan and capacitor should last a bit, even if it wasn’t the TempStar brand, which no longer has a dealer in the area.
And kudos to our ac repair person.
Nice to know my unit is relatively new, about 4 years old, and uses R-410a refrigerant.
tried to post yesterday, as I had the capacitor issue myself earlier this week and wanted to let you know. WordPress took my reply, but never posted it on the blog, and shot down my attempts to repost as duplicate. Very odd. Very glad that your issue was similar and easy.
Hmm. It’s not showing as stuck in the spam filter. I think it was just a WP glitch. Sorry about that.
I can say we’ve had a cool, comfy day.
I got the critical scene done. Yay me!
I’m not sure whether it’s best to get into the next one or not.
I may wait til tomorrow.
Hooray! A cooled-off writer is a happy and productive writer 🙂 You saved to replace your car, I’m sure you can do something much like that for the day your air conditioning decides to go see Lord Geigi in the sky.
Yea you!
Interesting HVAC article. Sounds like Carrier, and maybe more big manufacturers, did the big corporation thing and scheduled their product conversions in a timely manner, but now may be getting undercut by the companies going through the loophole. So, Carrier isn’t exactly a white knight. Maybe pearl grey?
I stayed in a hotel once that had a refrigerator whose working fluid was ammonia. This was very apparent since it leaked. The hotel promptly replaced it.
The weather down here in SoCal has been a little odd. We have cloud cover, warmth, and humidity from Central American latitude storms. So, it’s warm and humid, but solar gain is low so my home stays cool all day, more that 10°F under the high.
I’m getting the ° symbol by activating the Win8 touch keyboard (which is completely different from the handicapped touch keyboard you can use at logon–*shaking my head in disbelief at MS*), which has a ridiculous number of symbols. (Play with it: I dare you.) Anyway, so how is it that the standard computer keyboard, which really just reflects the ASCII code (early 1960s), does not have ° ¢ £ © ® ™ — (em dash) etc. but does have the relatively useless (in those pre-C language times) { } & _ \. Sure, ° was an o rolled up on a typewriter platen, but…. C used all those symbols because they were there. Back when ASCII was designed, it was pretty much COBOL, Fortran, and assembly language; and the usual teletypes didn’t have any of those symbols except &. And, we’ve pretty much not changed. It’s very difficult, other than the touch keyboard, to get € ¥ ₩ ₹ (the last is ruble, which is very new: Russia decided since everyone else had a currency symbol with lines through it, they wanted one, too).
Anyway: “‘Tis a puzzlement.”
I spent several years working down the street from the Thrifty ice-cream plant in El Monte (which is still there). Occasionally they had a coolant leak, and it was ammonia. Only once was it serious (and of course that was the day we were supposed to have Important Visitors).
Your AC reminds me of the time the well pump quit working – and of course we had company. It turned out not to be the pump itself (which was down a couple of hundred feet, at the time), but the power cable, which had had its insulation worn through by flexing in the casing through-hole. It would have been spectacular, if it hadn’t been underground: it vaporized at least an inch of one of the three conductors, and about half that of another.
We just had the same thing happen to our well within the last month. No vaporized conductors, just worn-through insulation and/or broken wires. Since the pump was last replaced before we bought the house in 1998 we decided to go ahead and replace it since it was probably not long for this world anyway and the guys already had it out of the casing. The well guys said the wiring was worn through by the torque caused by the pump turning on. You’d think someone would have figured out a solution to that problem by now since they know it’s an issue. Sigh.
We did replace the heating and outside air conditioner unit in 2001 or so, but I’ve always felt it’s a little undersized. My kitchen is on the southwest side of the house so it’s warm in the afternoon. We had a really hot summer in 2002 – 100 degree days aren’t common in MD but we had a string of them that year. I called the A/C people out several times griping because it was HOT; they finally said they had only sized the unit to reduce the temperature 20 degrees below the outside temperature. Since I moved here from Texas, I knew darn good and well it should have been possible for them to have put in a system that would WORK. Still annoys me, but thank heaven we haven’t had many heat waves like we had that year.
Nothing like having your electrical systems throwing fireworks!
We’ve been looking into the possibility of installing solar roof panels. HI gets a nice bit of solar influx, and it’s dumb not to take advantage of it, but the initial outlay, despite being partly covered by the government and paying itself back in about 5 years, is high (the cost of parking a town car on the roof). The local government agency in charge of such grants came out with a small platoon of assessors, and in the end, we were told our neighborhood was not being considered for the subsidies. Sigh. If we want any type of solar, we’re on the stick for it ourselves. It’s sad; our house has nice flat roofs on the carport and laundry room for a solar array, and having solar power would certainly take a big bite our of the electric bill, but expense!
We have individual air conditioners in rooms; we could have central air installed, but it would be overkill in most cases. Aside from us, very little needs a/c, so only cool off where we are.
Chondrite, you may have looked at this already, but here in Europe, as of last year when solar panels became a lot cheaper because of Chinese firms getting into that market, investing money in solar panels gets a higher return, both in savings on the electricity bill and in buy-back of overproduction by the electricity companies, than letting the same money sit in a savings account would generate as interest.
Once that point is reached, if you have a savings account that you won’t need in the next 10 years, putting the money to work in the shape of solar panels makes financial sense, even though the initial investment is high. If you get good quality panels, they work for about 20 years (my first low-quality ones stopped doing much after 12-15 years), so if you get your investment back in five, after that the savings start to add up (if you do save some of what you aren’t paying for electricity, instead of just adding it to the monthly disposable income).
I have no idea at which point this might be for you, because cost of electricity, buy-back guarantees, subsidies, import restrictions or tariffs keeping prices up, are all different where you live, but looking at energy savings as an alternative for the present (and likely for the next few years) low interest rates on a savings account might still make sense, if you’re planning for the long term.
Around here, solar electrical production is a can of worms. You need county approval before you slap a set of panels on your roof, which is fine, and it must be done by a licensed contractor. The electric companies, OTOH, are throwing fits because with hundreds if not thousands of people feeding excess energy irregularly back into the system, they have trouble balancing loads (they say), and what happens on cloudy days when solar needs to be supplemented. They are unready to deal with so many people going solar to cut their very high electricity bills, and are throwing up all types of obstacles about how many people in a neighborhood would be permitted to have a solar system, if they can sell back excess production, and other complaints. Many people think it’s because the electric companies see the end of an era of captive customers, and are unwilling to let that cash cow go.
Ow!