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gentleman_farmer

Need to replace one of two AC units in my house...

gentleman-farmer
10 years ago

First things first, I'm in Texas and it's hot and humid here! It's routinely in the 90's during the midst of summer including right now. But in the winter, there might be stretches of time where you put the heat on.

We have two AC units - one for the bedrooms and one for the rest of the house plus a guest room. The total house is 4 bedroom and 2900 square feet.

A while ago the heat stopped working on the one unit, and then it was low on Freon later. We added Freon and shortly after it was not blowing that cold again. We figure it's time to replace it.

I'm not entirely sure on the lingo as to what is the AC versus the HVAC... so please bear with me!

Both AC units are from 1994. The 5 ton unit that cools/heats the common areas seems to run fine. We didn't plan on replacing it.

But the bedroom ac unit is a 2 ton and we figure it's more economical to replace it instead of add Freon every other month. The big catch here is that we are planning on moving in the next 3'ish years so we don't exactly want to throw a bunch of money at an AC unit that we won't "get back" when it's time to sell.

Quotes

So far I've had 2 quotes, both around $4,000 for ac + heat.

But neither person did a load test (read some threads on here) nor did they inspect the duct work. In fact, they never even talked about the duct work.

One of the guys who came to write a quote simply peaked into the attic, observed the unit and went back down. He didn't touch anything or seem to inspect beyond a cursory glance. I'm not sure if that's bad per se, since I read it as being not very thorough.

The units these guys liked were Trane and Bryant and the other guy just liked Bryant because he said Trane got bought out 5 years ago and they've slipped a little.

To be sure, it's a big expense for me, so I want to do it a) right and b) cost efficiently. My biggest concern is I just feel really blind going into this. And these HVAC professionals just have me scratching my head...

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