before i was a homeowner a $100 expense seemed gargantuan. if something cost $500... forget it, i went ballistic. but now, a mere 6 months into home ownership, a $9,000 estimate for furnace repair seems reasonable.
how the fuck did that happen? i balk over spending more than $20 on a new blouse, but $9,000 for something intangible like heat is just fine.
well, it's not "fine", as you might imagine. but i've illustrated my point. right?
so someone new from carolina air conditioning just came out to rescue us from our frigidness. note to self: i'm going to specifically ask for jim whenever i call these people again. jim totally rocks. jim just got out of the marines and has been working for this company for all of 2 weeks. in the marines, he did this kind of stuff (plus a lot more, which apparently took him to iraq, but he didn't want to talk about it)... he says he's been doing this kind of heating & cooling work since he was 12, for what that's worth.
anyway, jim had lots of fun trying to figure out why we had no heat. something went wonky in the thermostat (he speculated, 'off the record' that elnora --the woman who came out last week-- tried to make something better by attaching a blue wire somehwere, but in the process ended up breaking something), plus he spotted burned wires and blown fuses (no fault of elnora's) in the package unit outside.
i just love that term. package unit. yeah, baby.
anyway, it took him some time, but he eventually got the heat back up & running. it sounds like he really had to rig something up, though. he took lots of time showing me all the different parts in the package unit (heh heh) and giving me little demonstrations of how everything worked. thanks to jim's illustrative talents, it didn't take me long to realize that i had a crappy package unit. we started talking about my options, and even though i like jim an awful lot i really don't want to have to see him more than absolutely necessary... he intimated the same thing: that i could keep calling him out for temporary fixes, or i could start thinking about a whole new unit.
*sigh*
anyway, after we had heat back in the house again, he did a quick analysis of my air-flow pressure out of each vent and got really concerned. he said there was hardly any air coming out the ducts in the back of the house. he went slithering around the crawlspace with his little meter and emerged 15 mintues later proclaiming total disaster.
i knew this house once had oil heat. but apparently (according to jim) when the upgrade was made to electric heat there was no upgrade made to the duct work. oil heat, it seems, pushes a higher volume of hot air through the ducts than my current electric package unit does. so the air from my electric heat is not even coming close to filling up the ducts. think of putting your mouth on a tailpipe and blowing, jim says. you get lots of "back pressure" because the volume of what you're displacing is bigger than the pipe. but then think of blowing into a dryer vent, for instance... your hot air isn't going to make it very far down the tube, because it's so much bigger in diameter. he is suspecting i'll need new, smaller duct work.
so jim gets on the phone to troy, who apparently is the head honcho over at carolina heating & cooling. troy shows up not 5 minutes later and does the crawlspace slither, takes some measurements, then starts his pitch with a "what the hell were the previous owners thinking" rant that i've heard oh-so-many-times before.
to make this long story short, troy does some magic calculating and hands me a price quote of $9,280. at the risk of boring you all, i'm going to write down all the info from his quote.
$9,280.
the good thing is that i'd be eligible for financing, at the montly cost of $209.50. and when i put this all into perspective, this new unit will probably save me that much on my heating bill each month. no joke.
plus, i get a gas line run to the house, which is exciting. (in a way that only homeowners find natural gas exciting.)
but this is just one company's estimate, and i've already been on the phone to someone else to come out and take a look and give me their own version of the bad news. i do have to find a company that will offer financing, though, as i'm not a wealthy individual. especially these days.
i think i need to go lie down now.
Posted by xta at December 9, 2003 01:58 PM | TrackBack