So the Goodman HVAC system that was installed after the late great hail storm, on the insurance company’s dime, needs some service. I guess. Turned it on at 7:30 this morning. After it had pounded away for an hour, the thermostat recorded a one-degree rise in temperature (yeah: that’s 1 degree).
It’s been making some annoying outdoor noises, but Goodman runs noisy anyway, so I haven’t paid much attention.
Fortunately, the Goodman has a 10-year warranty on parts & labor, so this misadventure shouldn’t cost me much.
The warranty runs out in 2021, which, when you think about it, ain’t all that much longer. That’s only 5 years from now…
Replacing the type of air-conditioning & heating system needed in Arizona is an expensive proposition. For a house like mine, cost is likely to run $4,000 to $8,000. Or up: SDXB paid $5,500 for a system serving a smaller house than mine.
And in the New Ecologically Correct and Internationally Traded Environment? Not very effective. My Chinese-made heat pump, for example, freezes up when exterior temps drop into the 30s, at which point it blows ice-cold air into the house.
Over the past few years, the way I use my house has changed. A lot.
I used to spend most of the daytime hours in my office, working on a large and powerful desktop computer. Then my back went out. Now I can NOT sit in a desk chair any more than a few minutes without enjoying limp-inducing hip and back pain (and yes, I have tried all sorts of ergonometric chairs). The only way I can work for any length of time (and “work” for me entails hour after hour after interminable hour focused on arcane, mind-numbing copy) is to recline in an overstuffed leather chair with my feet up on an ottoman and a MacBook on my lap.
That chair is in a large room that comprises a family room, dining area, and kitchen. Two doors opening into the backyard accommodate the dogs’ comings and goings. And…that means that instead of moving around the house — from the office to the kitchen to the dog exits and to the dining area and back to the office — I spend most of my time in one centralized area: a single room, really.
At night I go back to the bedroom. And that’s about it: in fact I’m only occupying two rooms of a six-room house (eight, if you count the closet-like bathrooms).
So lately I’ve found myself wondering…why the hell am I air-conditioning and heating this entire building when I’m living in about a third of it??
In the wintertime (because it doesn’t get very cold here), it’s fairly easy to live without central heating. A plug-in space heater will make a work room cozy enough, and an electric blanket or throw set on “low” will get one comfortably through a two-dog night.
As it develops, there are central HVAC systems that can be persuaded to “condition” the air only in a given space within a building. These are dubbed “ductless air-conditioning systems.” Some of them are…yup…pretty Third-World. But that doesn’t seem to matter, since the Funny Farm is now situated in the Third World anyway. Probably much as your home is or soon will be.
One of these is made by Mitsubishi. It’s very expensive. On the other hand, simply replacing one’s existing AC system with a new unit has grown into a ludicrously costly proposition. I’ve actually had one HVAC vendor propose something near 10 grand to replace my system, using its aging ductwork.
The beauty of the Mitsubishi system is that you don’t have to stick ugly portable AC units in your windows. In my house, that would be impractical, because all the windows are sliders. There’s no way you could install a window AC in any of the rooms without (expensively) replacing the windows, too. if you even could: the openings are too wide for double-hung windows.
The un-beauty of the Mitsubishi system is that it’s breathtakingly expensive. Not only do you have to cut holes in exterior walls to install the ductless vents, you also have install a central system that costs as much as or more(!!) than a traditional central air-conditioniong system. It would be pretty damn expensive. Indeed.
On the other hand, if you were only air-conditioning the rooms you use, and if you only use a couple of rooms on any given day, and five or six months out of every twelve you needed little or no air-conditioning either heat or cool, it wouldn’t take long to recoup the installation cost. And the environmental footprint, if anyone cares about that anymore in the Age of NeoHitler Trump, would be far, far smaller.
So…there’s no hurry to make this decision. The Goodman system presumably will run at least until 2021. It may even run longer than that. But into the future: ??? It behooves one to keep an eye on new developments.
Ductless systems are for homes without air ducts. You wouldn’t get a ductless system for your house if you have air ducts already–it just wouldn’t make sense.
The best thing for you is to keep your thermostat set to a high temperature during the day and getting a room air conditioner with a custom plate (you can make–lots of youtube vidoes) for the hose-to-window exhaust that you could easily put in your slider window. If you put a crossbar into the other half of the slider for added security, you’d be set. The room air condition, while not as cheap as a traditional window unit, would keep the room you were in cooler and use a lot less electricity and be less wear on your main unit.
Have you ever looked at selling your house and renting a small house instead? I don’t know your area’s rental market, but being a responsible-seeming woman of a certain age with guaranteed monthly SS checks, you are the dream tenant for a landlord with a spare 1-2 bedroom house rental. Perhaps rentals are expensive in your area, so who knows, but I’d be curious if you ever looked at the less traditional housing (private home rental vs. a traditional apartment). Especially as you wouldn’t have to worry about dying air conditioners again.
Why? All you’d have to do is seal off the ductwork. The ductless systems allegedly keep living areas comfortable at significantly less cost than a whole-house system that’s heating or cooling an entire building, most of which is uninhabited during the day.
I don’t think you’d want a sliding window or door hanging open — even a few inches — on a 115-degree day.
My house is paid for. I really have no desire to rent, even if I could afford it. Rental rates in the central part of the city will take your breath away. At one point I did look at renting a house…and simply could not BELIEVE how much people get for the places. And having paid my dues in the apartment living department, I really don’t want to do that again.
Have you considered renting out a bedroom in your house to someone else? As I recall you had a temporary tenant and it worked out pretty well. It would definitely work to defray some of the expenses of running the whole house if you could find someone compatible.
🙂 Just as I’ve paid my dues to apartment complexes, so have I paid my dues in the roommate department.
Actually, I did rent the spare bedroom (which has no bed…) to a friend who needed to stay in town until an employment contract ran out before she left to join her husband, who had taken a new job in San Francisco. It worked out OK in terms of personalities… But two of us in here ran up the power bills so much it pretty well negated any financial benefit for me. Most people don’t care for a house to be as cold as it is right this minute (61 degrees…) or as hot as it gets in here during the summertime (around 80 degrees).
Another friend, the long-haul trucker, would like to rent a landing pad here. However, she has a cat, which she expects the landlady to take care of. Cats are another arena in which I have paid my dues, in spades. No more cats.
The Long-Haul Trucker has been doing the rental thing for several years. Her house was foreclosed during the Bush Recession; the guy who bought it rented it back to her. You should HEAR the wild stories she has…and the recording she made, from out in the hall, of the S&M sex antics of one character and his “friend.”
Couple of things….First they actually do make AC units to go in your sliders. Go on the Home Depot and Lowes websites to find them. As memory serves a bit more expensive BUT you don’t need to put in new windows. AND IMHO this is the way to go. If I bought or built a new home today, I would go with electric baseboard heat as back up to a woodstove and window units to handle the AC duties. With replacement costs for a heating/cooling systems approaching $10K in this neck of the woods….actually just had a DF replace his last Winter….$25K….no misprint. Big home BUT $25 K??? In contrast I heat my home with wood and have two in the wall AC units from Whirlpool that do a great job. No service policy….tuneup…cleaning…etc. These units were less than $500 for both….bought on a deal from HD in 2005. They came with remote control devices, have several settings including “power saver” (my favorite) and have a SEER of 13. Their usable life is about 10 years, so quick math tells us we are on borrowed time. So when one/both goes up….I shop around for a deal…pop the trim…remove the shims…slide out the old unit….slide in the new one…replace the trim and shims….Done. A Service Policy for a whole house unit is $350 for AC and $350 for the heat…per year….and covers basically an annual cleaning.