My Old House

Issues and Events involving our Home in Independence, Missouri
My Old House on Winner Road
9/15/2004

Where’s the Air ? Part II !

Filed under: Heating and Cooling — Admin @ 3:25 pm

I awoke again this morning (at 3:30 AM) to find the interior blower going… but the house seemed warm! The thermostat said it was 72 degrees… and that’s what I had it set at… but the house just seemed too warm for that to me!

Well, since the new thermostat is NOT programmable, there were a lot fewer buttons for me to push. But this time, I got a pad of paper, a pen, and my watch.

Over the next 40 minutes or so, I basically learned that:

1) The interior blower was running constantly.
2) But the exterior blower / unit would start up about every 11 minutes…. and then run for only 2 minutes.

This seemed strange to me. You see, we had bought a new air conditioner at our PREVIOUS house about 2 years ago. And it always seemed to me like, whenever the inside blower was on, the outside one was too!

Well, I posted a question about it on the Yahoo Groups FixerUppers mailing list. As I write this, I haven’t heard anything from anybody yet.

I would have called Ed by now, but a cold front came through today and now I’ve got the A/C off anyways.

Still, I plan on discussing this with some people and, if necessary, contacting Ed about it.

Where’s the Air ??

Filed under: Heating and Cooling — Admin @ 3:19 pm

Today was a warm day… mid-to-high 80′s. Not incredibly hot, but warm enough to make air conditioning necessary.

However, I came home at about 1:30 PM, after running a lot of errands all morning, to find the house was very warm, but the inside blower was running!

I tried lowering the temperature, then turning the furnace off and back-on, but the outside A/C blower would not kick in!

I called Ed Frechin and he came out within an hour. It seemed like something was wrong with the delay between the time when you gave the thermostat a command and the time when the external unit actually started running.

Now, as I’ve written here before, I’ve woken in the morning several …

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9/14/2004

New Furnace !

Filed under: Heating and Cooling — Admin @ 3:07 pm

Ahhh… today was a good day!

When we originally had our inspector look at this house, he basically “condemned” the furnace! It was an Arkla, circa 1983. In fact, he told us it had been RECALLED in 1983, apparently because the heat exchangers didn’t last very long.

He did some sort of sonic test that told him how full of pin-holes the heat exchanger was.

Then he joked: “Well, this is proof that the house is VERY drafty, since nobody’s DIED in here yet !”

The heat exchanger was leaking a lot of carbon monoxide. So, he advised us that the furnace would need to be replaced.

Well, we managed to get $1000 …

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8/28/2004

Getting a grip on heating and cooling

Filed under: Heating and Cooling — Admin @ 9:58 am

Had another HVAC person out today to give me an estimate. He was very informative!

After discussing things with him… and thinking it over, I decided that… while we WILL replace the furnace and the coil that acts as the “inside half” of the air conditioner, we’d wait on replacing the outside unit. Instead, I’ll put some money into putting insulation up under the roof, where there is NONE ! This seems like a better investment.

I turned on the attic window-unit A/C early in the afternoon and left it on until bedtime. However, at about 1 AM, we woke up to heat and humidity again. So much for my theory about the attic A/C helping …

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