New A/C in Life in General

So we moved into this house last summer and the first thing we noticed was how poor the A/C was. On a hot day, the inside temp would creep up and up to 80F by about 4pm. Luckily I own a nice portable AC unit and was able to keep the temperature down to about 75F, but of course that’s only in the one room it’s installed in and the rest of the home is still hot.

Now with all of the other work this house needs, we don’t exactly have the money to replace the entire AC system. Jessica’s parents last summer were acting like it’d be no big deal for them to replace it, since they technically own the house.

Side note:

I don’t know if I ever explained that, but the house is in their name because Jessica’s school loans blocked us from getting it. We couldn’t even get her parents to cosign the loan or anything, just completely blocked. So dumb that society tells you…

…”go to school, get your education… oh and btw now you’re unqualified to buy a house until you pay this off so have fun renting for 15 years until then… don’t worry housing prices won’t skyrocket by then!”

Back to it:

Anyway so yeah her parents own the house as an “investment property” and we are paying the note. So yeah they figure “well we own the house we can pay for the AC” and that made sense but that was last summer. Now they’re acting like they don’t really have much money (for a long complicated reason) right now so it’s possible the AC situation will be totally on us to get fixed. Which is fine, but…

I’m not exactly rich right now. So I need to do this as cheaply as possible for the time being. Long term, I’d love to have a nicer fancier system completely replace what we have, but for now I’m researching simpler fixes.

Weird AC quirk:

So this house has a strange setup. The outside unit is from 2011, and uses R22 refrigerant which was phased out a long time ago. Inside, the unit is a newer 2017 model from a different company that was set up for R410a (which was phased out this year but you can still buy old stock units until they run out), but was modified to use R22. I mean you can technically do that, since R22 runs at a lower pressure but it’s just weird.

My guess is that something leaked or whatever on the inside unit, so they decided to just replace that and leave the outdoor unit running. But since they weren’t making R22 units anymore, they bought a R410a unit and just converted to save money instead of replacing both.

Well basically, I’m gonna do something similar. Our inside unit appears to be totally fine, and it’s only 8 years old. So I’m gonna try and convert it back to R410a and install only a new R410a unit outdoors. I can buy one online for about $2500 and then just pay someone to install it. Removing an old compressor and installing a new one doesn’t look super hard, so I’d be willing to try it myself but since we’d also be converting to a new refrigerant and replacing a TXV valve, I think it’s best if I just let a pro do it. Plus they can handle disposing of the old one for me so that’s a plus.

I had a tech out today to look at it and he seemed willing to try that process so I’m just waiting on a quote from him for an install. As long as it’s less than $2000 I’d be willing to move forward with that. I just really want to get this done quickly before it starts to warm up because if there are any issues it’d give us time to address it.

Because the risks are real. Without replacing the indoor unit, I’m risking that if there’s a leak on it I’m out another few thousand to replace it. And flushing old refrigerant is risky as well… if they don’t get all of the old oil out it can react with the new oil and burn up the brand new compressor.

But the benefits are I get another 5 or 6 years out of this system for only a few thousand dollars. And in the meantime I can save up for the system I really want.

Long term I want to replace the gas furnace with an inverter heat pump unit. But the cost there is probably gonna be in the $18,000 range so I’d like to wait on that if I can haha.