heater guy says replace furnace/AC

Sadly, no. Be interesting if I did.

Reply to
Stormin Mormon
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We are in the process of replacing our 20 year furnace and air conditioner with a furnace and air to air heat pump for $6500. That's not including the federal tax credit of $1500 and the local energy company's credit of $620. Couldn't pass up the deal. Michigan prices.

Reply to
c1gmlm

Replaced our 35 year old gas furnace with a high efficiency non condensing furnace (High medium efficiency?) 2 stage burner, 2 speed DC eductor fan and variable speed DC blower - didn't save a cent on gas. The couple percent improvement in gas efficiency was countered by the VAST improvement in blower efficiency - so the heat that was no longer supplied by the inefficient blower motor had to be made up by the gas.

It IS saving us significantly on electricity, however.

A 10% improvement in gas efficency would mean less than $50 per year, and a "high efficency" furnace would not be 10% better than what we got. Figured the extra expense, and generally shorter life of a condensing furnace, would take too long to pay-back to make it worth while.

Didn't replace the (still working well) 35 year old AC. A 14 SEER would be nice - the old one is likely closer to 5 - but since we generally only use it about 5 days a year, the payback on that one would go to our grandchildren!!!

Reply to
clare

Which just shows how foolish some business people can be and how much more money they'd be making if they had some sense.

I don't think so. You can buy a brand new refrigerator typical of what you might find in many apartments for $400. Using your example, I think it's highly unlikely that you're going to find the average repair cost for a service call on a 25 year old refrigerators is going to be 25%, which is only $100. That's where all the math breaks down. And that's even before you factor in pissed off tenants with spoiled food, the overhead of the calls they make to management in the middle of the night, how your apartment looks with a 25 year old unit compared to others that may have newer appliances and command higher rent, etc.

In the case of the OP's 25 year old gas furnace, I think most of us here would agree it could make sense to put a few hundred dollars in repairs to it under certain circumstances. However, I think very few would say that it makes sense to put repairs costing anywhere near half the cost of a new system into it.

Reply to
trader4

With the prices of so many "things" dropping,(and the markup, or "profit" on the sale shrinking even faster,)it is QUITE possible that fixing things will make more money than replacing in the not so very distant future - particularly when disposal of the "spent" product is factored in. We live in a VERY wasteful society.

To me, if the choice is fixing something that has worked well for10 or more years at a cost of X dollars, and replacing it with something of unknown (but suspect) quality for 2X dollars, I sure know where MY money is going.

Reply to
clare

Yes, that often factors into my own decision making process - the unknown quality of a new product. Unfortunately, anymore, it seems like a lot of the time they "don't build 'em like they used to" and rebuilding an older product actually results in a better result than replacing.

Of course, you never know if that is actually the case until you've bought the new product and discarded the old...

nate

Reply to
N8N

Hi. OP here. Guess what, the thing seems to be working again. Perhaps we had a sticky thermostat, or fiddling the works broke loose some dirt on a sensor, or something. Perhaps I didn't know what a normal cycle looks like. Perhaps the repair guys didn't, either. I'm pretty sure it looked like it was misbehaving more, with the front panel off. Then again, perhaps the repair guy did know, and was yanking my thermostat from the start.

I also Googled Carrier 58SS and see a lot of similar complaints about similar age units - with no clear answers. May be a variety of things that fail, at this age.

Anyway, looks like it doesn't have to be replaced *today*, but I'm better for the education, and will keep the estimates on file.

J.

Reply to
JRStern

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