Laurie mentioned earlier the fact that our AC stopped working this past weekend, so for those interested here are the details and an update …

Monday (Memorial Day) was really the first time that we have turn on our AC this year. We’ve had a relatively mild, if not cool at times, spring. That is until this past weekend. Monday shot up into the upper 80s so on went the AC. Instead of the house getting cooler, it got hotter. And after checking the air coming out of the vents, I understood why. The AC as blowing, but it was not cooling. I figured it was out of Freon or something, but the unit is original to the house so who knows for sure. That makes it 20 years old, which is at the high end for the life of a heat pump. So we dealt with things on Monday and I resolved to work from home on Tuesday, which was going to be in the 90s, so we could get someone out to look at it.

C’s day care provider happens to have a sister who owns a Heating and AC business, so she hooked us up with an appointment Tuesday morning when Laurie dropped off C. The guy came out, looked things over, and basically told us that he was 90% sure it was a leak, which could be fixed, but because of the age of the system, fixing it was pretty much tossing money down the drain. We kind of figured this anyway. The system really needs to be replaced. (Our unit is one of a handful left in our community that still has the original heat pump.) He was going to go back and write up a formal estimate for us. Just to get a second opinion, I called another guy out from a different company to look at things and give us an estimate. He pretty much said the same things and was going to write up an estimate for us as well.

We finally received both estimates by Wednesday evening and it turns out that both estimates are, while not cheap, within $30 of each other, have heat pumps with the exact same efficiency, and pretty much the same warranties. Our conundrum then became which to choose. We had a recommendation through C’s day care provider for the first company, which is always good, and after calling on Thursday morning, they said they could install it next Tuesday. The second guy, while very nice, honestly said it would be at least a week before they could install anything. So by next Tuesday evening we should have AC again, which is good because it’s supposed to start warming up again. Thankfully the weekend looks to be in the mid-70s, so we should be able to survive.