However, when I was playing guitar on Tuesday evening and realized I was literally pouring sweat and Jalapeno was panting on the floor next to me, I checked my thermometer and it was in the high 80s on the 3rd floor and over 90 degrees on the 4th. That wasn't normal. The outdoor unit seemed to be working... the fan was spinning. The unit in the basement was making noise. But nothing was cooling down the house.
To complicate the situation, the only fan I owned was one used for construction projects (such as blowing plaster or brick dust out the window). Elora was fine in the basement. It stays relatively cool down there - mid 70s. However, poor Jali was another story. I put him in daycare.
Early the next morning I had to leave for my sister's surgery in Hershey. I called Air Dynamics HVAC from the waiting room and we arranged a time for them to come out. (They would have been willing to rearrange things to come that day, but I wasn't home). On the way back to Philly, I stopped at Kohl's to pick up a few fans to tide us over and ordered two more on Amazon. (At least I'm prepared if there is a next time... which now that I own 4 oscillating fans, there probably won't be).
In the end, the problem was diagnosed as a leak (of unknown size) in the coil. It eventually had leaked out all of the refrigerant and so there was nothing to cool with. They estimated that my unit was 20 years old and it still used R22 refrigerant, which is also very expensive, since it is being phased out. We ended up topping off the refrigerant (not cheap, although he sold it to me at cost) to allow the system to be used for a short time and moved ahead with planning a new system. Once Bernie and I settled on a system, the biggest obstacle was figuring out how we'd get the outdoor and indoor units in place. I have a very narrow and windy staircase leading down to the basement and the alley access to the area in back of my house is also more narrow than the unit of the size I needed for my house. As part of the work, we also planned for moving a few vents into more central locations to allow for better air flow. (For example, the only supply vent to the back of the 1st floor was underneath some built in shelves... it wasn't doing much but cooling down my juicer).
Today (7/17) is the day that the crew arrived to do the work. I assumed that there would be a fair amount of distractions with the project (and was correct), and I also needed to complete some planning for my upcoming 40th birthday party, so it has been a good opportunity to catch up on personal work that can be more easily interrupted than let's say, a conference call.
The album speaks for itself, but here are a few highlights of the work:
- The new outdoor unit is twice as big in every dimension than the old one (see the comparison).
Bernie believes that I was probably undersized to begin with given my space limitations, but he really did not want to have me spend the money on another undersized unit and continue to live with very hot 3rd and 4th floors in the summer and freezing cold 1st and 2nd floors in the winter. I really appreciate his dedication to this.
- The crew ended up building a wooden frame, similar to the type that I imagine the pharaohs in Egypt were carried around on, and carried the new unit over the top of the fence through an alley about 1/3 of the width of the unit and then into my backyard area through a 10' section of fence they removed temporarily.
- My spiral staircases made poor Elvis, who was assigned to do the duct work on the 3rd floor, dizzy. They could not believe I was running up and down the stairs all day, but I'm very used to them. He moved the vent to the middle of the room - coming down from the ceiling with spiral ducts - so that I'd get more air flow. I think it looks pretty cool!
- They had to remove my door in the basement (temporarily) to get the indoor unit down there, but nobody fell down the stairs or broke the walls, so that's a plus!
- The crew was here for almost 12 straight hours and didn't stop for anymore more than a cigarette break until I ordered pizza and chicken fingers for them at 5:30pm. By the end of the day, we were all pouring sweat!
Even though we did inadvertently let every insect in Old City into the house with all the in and out that was necessary, I'm super pleased with the team who did this project and with Air Dynamics. I would recommend them to anyone!
Here is an album of super interesting HVAC pictures :)
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