Whenever someone says to just trust them, I pretty much do the opposite. Most people that have asked me to trust them on something that I didn’t feel too good about have ended up doing me wrong. Whether intentional or not, it’s always gone right down the toilet with those sort of folks. So when the first realtor told me to just trust him about replacing the HVAC equipment with no further discussion, I was like next please. The next realtor at least started off pointing out all the positive of our home. That’s the way you start off a real estate relationship. Selling our home was not something that we came to easily. This was our home, where we raised our kids. So I appreciated her approach. But she too suggested that we replace the HVAC equipment. I told her that it might have another decade left in it since it was only 15 years old. On top of that, we always got good HVAC maintenance twice a year. It just didn’t make sense to me. To her credit, she popped open her laptop and showed me. Now that’s the sort of person I like to do business with. There was no just trust me talk. Instead, there was data that I could check which proved how essential new residential HVAC was for selling a house in this region. I’m sure glad we had this realtor be the one to get the listing. We ended up making a bunch of profit off the sale of the house and much of that credit goes to her and the HVAC equipment upgrade.
It took getting quite creative to get a home with my own HVAC
I can customize them to provide the amount of heating and cooling I want in different parts of my floor
Necessity is indeed the mother of invention. That is one of those sayings that is just one hundred percent true. And my need to have my own home with my own HVAC equipment pushed me to get creative to get this done. I was 37 years old and had been saving money for a downpayment on a house for 14 years. I was close but not close enough. So then I read an article about people my age and younger pooling their money in order to buy a big house and then share it. That sounded great to me and I looked into all the legal stuff first. Eventually, I found just the right people to do this with. And we all agreed that we’d find a three story house and each person would have their own floor as their living space. We’d share the kitchen and a small common area just off the kitchen. Well, we did it and we did it in such a way that we don’t have to share one thermostat for our quality heating and air comfort. The HVAC professionals installed a ductless multi split system so we all have our own pair of ductless heat pumps in our living space. The kitchen and common area got a pair as well. It’s worked out just wonderfully. I have to say that being able to build equity instead of paying rent makes working even that much more satisfying. I love the ductless heat pumps in my part of the house. I can customize them to provide the amount of heating and cooling I want in different parts of my floor. That’s really an awesome feature of the ductless heat pump as well.
No gambling on the heat pump this year
Last summer was a long, hot and anxious one for me.
- That had everything to do with betting on a dying heat pump to get us through the summer.
When we bought this house, we upgraded the residential HVAC. This was something that just had to be done as the old HVAC wasn’t going to cut it. In fact, we were able to get some really great HVAC equipment because we were willing to take on the HVAC replacement because the seller didn’t want to. That negotiating point saved us thousands on the final price of the house. We poured a lot of the money into the new residential HVAC. It was the best that we could find and it lasted just shy of 24 years. I can attribute that run of 24 years to good residential HVAC and consistent HVAC maintenance. We never had a big heating and cooling problem until that thing died. But somehow, we got caught with our pants down when it came to replacing that heat pump. It’s almost like I just thought that heat pump would run forever or something. So when we got the air conditioning tune-up last spring, the HVAC technician warned us to get a new HVAC unit sooner rather than later. As I said, we hadn’t put away a dime for the new HVAC equipment and wanted to buy time. That’s when we rolled the dice and bet on that old HVAC unit to get us through last summer. It did, but just barely. We eased up on the air conditioning load significantly and we just made it to mid September before the old heat pump gave out.
Evidently, our ductwork system was clogged up severely
When I was walking down the hallway in my house after adjusting the temperature control settings for the HVAC system, I noticed that the temperatures seemed to be quite uneven around the house.
The temperature wasn’t so bad in our bedroom, while in the living room it felt pretty overheated.
I wondered what was going on so I called up a local contractor to have our HVAC equipment looked at. It turned out that our ductwork system was clogged up a lot and we needed official ductwork cleaning. Since we have a pretty large house and sizable ductwork system, this wasn’t a cheap job at all. It was costly alright, but at least this solved the issue with our HVAC system. I also noticed improved air quality and the energy bills were lower after that. I guess having a clogged up ductwork system really does have a lot of setbacks. The HVAC professionals said that we should get our ductwork cleaned every few years or so to be on the safe side with a better running HVAC machine and good air quality. They also said it would be smart to enroll into their HVAC service plan where they would take care of most of the HVAC maintenance and repairs. They said if there were major repairs, we would have to pay more for things like that and we would also get plans that included ductwork cleaning which would save us a lot of money in the future. That is something we will have to think about doing. I’m not the kind of person to just rush into a contract.