Well, it's nice to be off a little while in the summer to relax and take care of things that I don't have much time for during the year. I have been spending most of my time with family and on pet research projects that are kind of like my hobbies now that I'm in medical school. Unfortunately our fairly new home is having some problems that need attention as well. Thank you Pulte (http://www.pulte.com/), for using "builder grade" junk to construct our home. Pulte seems to use a lot of parts (faucets, A/C's, etc.) that fail in only a few years (we just replaced our main sink faucet ... we are not going to replace the inadqueate duct work, which would cost $8000). I hope their "cutting corners" reputation / using parts that fail in 5 years catches up with them. To their credit, our furnace is nice, as shown in the picture above left. The air conditioning portion lacks an expansion valve and instead relies on an orifice.
One of the things needing attention is our central air conditioner, which is being replaced at a very young and tender 6 years of age. Ours had some kind of leak or other problem that was causing it to freeze and fail about every 3 months, making us hot at the most inopportune times (usually a Holiday, like 4th of July when you can't find a A/C repair person). We have had a Carrier 3.5 ton Model CK3BXA042021AAAA / 38BRC042330 (R-22 Refrigerant, which is being phased out) (see picture at left). Needless to say, the Carrier central A/C should not be failing so soon and it really makes me think that Carrier parts quality is very poor (along with the Pulte unwise selection of parts and home construction of that unit). Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks so (see another Carrier complaint). The complaints.com link also allows searching by brand and "Carrier Air" turns up about 96 complaints compaired to 12 for Lennox and about 12 for Pulte. Every A/C company is likely to get some complaints, but Carrier really stands out and Pulte does not reflect well on themselves for choosing that brand. If Carrier wanted to improve, they might start with paint that doesn't fall off after a few years (note the Carrier label that is falling off the top of the unit in an attempt to hide the guilty). However, that's what came with the house, so it wasn't really something we could do a lot about other than replace certain critical components, which is what we are doing. I noticed our neighbors also had theirs serviced recently as well, and so I don't think the problem is limited to our home. We are replacing the central A/C system with a 4 ton Lennox Ch23-41 / XC14048 (new R-410A refrigerant) unit for about $6400 from Central City Air here in Houston.
We had a Lennox central A/C in one of our previous other homes, and it lasted 18 years, which is how long these air conditioners should be lasting. We nursed that previous 18 year-old Lennox unit along near the end and found out that it's better to replace a failing unit early on after we had sunk a couple of thousand in repairs into it. A few $200 bills here, and another $400 bill there, and pretty soon, you could have paid for a new unit. Our outside condenser system just plain looks bad for its age and corroded and our A/C repair man raised a number of concerns about the construction and working parts of that system as well. Our home is one of those "high efficiency" homes, which uses more insulation and an undersized heating and cooling system. High efficiency with an undersized A/C also means that the air conditioner will work harder and longer to begin with; add poor parts quality from Carrier and poor construction from Pulte and you wind up with a problem in only a few years that we had to address. Despite these little annoyances we have been enjoying living in the Houston area, however. There is a lot to do for our children (local parks, beach, entertainment, etc.), traffic moves pretty well, and the cost of living here (including gas prices) is low compared to national averages ... we save money overall living here and it's quite nice. I even like our neighborhood; it's attractive, safe, and people are friendly. I should not complain too much. However, I wasn't able to find a lot of information concerning the actual quality of air conditioning units on the web, so I thought I would write this up.
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