3:00pm – We just barely made it!  Any longer without the air running and we would have started cooking up here.  The water and Gatorade supplies are about gone.  Now we’re all looking forward to some cold beer after the job is done.  What’s left is conecting all of the ductwork and this can be done while the air is blowing cold into the attic.  The first part of this stage is fitting the junction box.  This is a pre-fabricated cube constructed of insulation with one face connected to the output of the air conditioner, and up to five branches coming off of it (in our case we only have three.  The first thing we’re going to do it measure and cut holes for the three duct branches.  We do this first beause it’s easier to do before the junction box is mounted to the air conditioner, and it will allow the air to flow freely after it is mounted.  Now we measure and cut a square out of the face of the junction box that will fit to the air conditioner.  We fit it in place and use a liberal amount of silver tape (the installers best friend).  Now we connect the duct branches to the holes we cut in the other three sides in pretty much the same fashion.

5:00pm – The cold air is now running throughout the house and the thermostat is slowly starting to inch downward.  We still have a few things left to do, like connecting the exhaust pipes for the heater and clean up inside and out, but overall we’re saying ‘mission accomplished’ and we’re sitting down for a few well deserved cold beers…ringht under the air conditioning vent (-;

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About a month ago as the temperatures were sustaining in the 100+ range here in Texas, we noticed that our 20-year old Trane system was running for about 5 minutes, cutting off for about 2 minutes, thn kicking in again.  The temperature was getting down to the 81 degree setting on the thermostat (…you see Mr. Obama, not everyone sets their air conditioning to 78), but the humidity was never getting below 50% because the unit didn’t run long enough to effectively bring down the humidity.  Basically it was short-cycling.  Now, we’ve never had this problem in the past so we ran a full perventative maintenance on the system and found that the freon level was down about 20%, but mostly that the clutch on the blower motor was starting to fail.  It was drawing some serious amps in order to kick in.  I could only imagine what the electricty bill was going to look like for this month!

Even though the Trane unit was still working, we decided it was time to get serious about replacing this old unit before we experienced an outage and at the same time, reduce our electricty bill.  Another thing that factored into our decision was that the adjoining central heating system was one of the old pilot light jobs that have been phased out some years ago due to safety concerns.  We contacted a couple of home air conditioners installers who quoted us on a new central air conditioning and heating systems and we finally settle on a Carrier 24ABB4 (14 SEER Rating) split system with Puron refrigerant, and a Carrier 58STA/STX heater.  There were more energy efficient systems available with a better SEER rating that would quality for the new tax rebate, but we could not justify the increased cost vs savings.  The system we chose will give us the best bang for the buck.

Now that we’ve signed on the bottom line and scheduled the installation date, all that is left is the perparation.  In the next post, we’ll tell you all about the installation process and the decisions we needed to make along the way.