Bow wows, spread the cool

On the way home from work I picked up the dogs from Ali’s place.  Even though Ali doesn’t leave until today she thought it would be easier for me to take them last night so she could pack without Nicki getting upset, she knows what a suitcase means.

I loaded up the dogs and two boxes of supplies to get them through their week long stay at the house.  The truck was kind of full.

Last night as I was outside in the yard, my neighbors from Michigan came over to the fence, they are down for a few days.  They told me their AC died and wanted to pick my brain about the system I had put in.  I told them how we went pretty high end with our system and it has been money well spent, the Trane has been working like a champ.  Not only is the house much cooler, my energy costs have dropped dramatically.

I explained to my neighbor that we spent a lot of money but part of that was all the labor utilized to rip out the majority of my duct work and to rebuild the mounting spot for the air handler so it wasn’t leaning to the left.  We also benefited from several incentive plans at the time which knocked a couple grand off the cost. Unfortunately those incentives are no longer in place.

It sounded like my neighbors were considering going a cheaper route, putting in a less efficient 16 seer or maybe even a 13 seer unit. (mine is 18.5 seer)  In the short term they are thinking since they are only in the house maybe one month out of the year it is hard to justify spending a ton on the AC.  However their master plan is to retire in a couple years and move down here permanently.  In that scenario they could wind up kicking themselves in the head for not going with a more efficient model.

I asked them how hot it was inside their house right now.  They said somewhere around 85 degrees, ouch.  I told them they could borrow my window unit AC which saved our ass the last time we had an extended power outage.  It works just fine for cooling off a bedroom.  I know what it is like to sleep in a house down here in the summer with no AC, it is pretty miserable.

They wisely took me up on my offer.