A few years ago, our central air conditioning unit began showing signs of eventual–more like near term–failure. Of course, we looked into replacement; who wants to live through sweltering summers? And then, after several years of annual “resurrection calls” to AC service folk of varying ability, it failed.
We chose to swelter through that Summer. (OK, we added fans. *meh* Was not all that bad.)
But what did we ultimately do? Well, we had several options:
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Continue to suffer through the humidity of late Spring and the heat and humidity of Summer.
Try to ameliorate the situation by installing a whole house fan–an option that appealed to me but wasn’t a solid sell.
Install a new central AC unit.
Or…
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Zone the house and use “point cooling”.
Sure, a new unit would probably have worked and been more efficient than our old one by far, but what we ended up with
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Cost much less than 1/10 of replacing (and upgrading, of course, including the air handler that would’ve had to be replaced inside, etc.) the central AC unit
Uses much less electricity than the old central AC unit, and not much more than when we went a Summer with just fans!
Allows us to effect additional savings when we want by simply turning off cooling for areas we aren’t using.
Of course, we went with the least expensive method of zoning the house: window units. Yeh, yeh, I’m sure that impacts the salability of the house, but since that’ll really only affect our heirs, we just DGARA. We own the place (no mortgage) and have no intention of ever moving, so why should we care? (If they want,the kids can install central AC when we’re gone and they need to sell the house. We won’t care.)
Disadvantages: minimal.
Advantages: overwhelming.
Thinking inside the box and looking away from stale, boring, “standard” solutions can make one’s lifestyle more affordably comfortable.
Oh, one cool plus: freed up the 60-AMP 240-Volt circuit the central AC had run on to be split into 2 30-AMP 120-Volt circuits. Sweet!