Well, there’s no need to get an energy audit, for we now know the reason for the huge power bill.
We had a few very warm days last week, and even though I was already looking around for an HVAC service company, the “looking around” became more urgent as we realized our upstairs heatpump was not pumping the heat out.
I found a local company and the new HVAC guy came out Sunday and after poking around, gave us the bad news. The compressor is shot. Not only is it shot, but the entire unit is pretty cheap and crappy. He suggested that instead of sinking $1500-2000 bucks into it, we look into getting a new unit.
Unfortunately this was not news. We had someone come out in the fall* because of some problems with the heating upstairs, and I now remember (hindsight - ain’t it grand?) something being said about the compressor. I also remember they said roughly the same thing. That our unit was the cheapest piece of crap that our builder could get away with using and we’d spend our dollars better by matching them with some friends and springing for a whole new unit.
(*We didn’t call that same company again becuase a) I couldn’t remember what company it was and b) they had double charged us in the past which kind of pissed me off and finally c) the techs were always really confusing and hard to understand.)
However, after they left, our heat mysteriously started working again, and we dismissed the entire visit from our minds and went on our merry way.
Until this past Sunday.
After the new HVAC guy gave us the bad news, I asked him if anything would work.
“Cooling is a no. Heating?” I asked.
“Emergency heat only,” he replied.
Emergency heat. This is where the little lightbulb went off over my head.
“Emergency heat. That would probably suck a lot of power, wouldn’t it?” I asked.
“Why yes, yes it would,” he answered.
(Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner! Ed McMahan, tell 99k what she has won! Why, she’s won power bills from over the winter that were way way way too high, just what she’s always wanted!)
New HVAC Guy would not do any warranty work on this brand of unit, because this manufacturer is apparently really crappy to work with for warranties, and he was only a one man operation and didn’t want to spend his time driving down to The Sticks, VA to deal with them.
Long story short, after flirting with the possibility of replacing the unit, getting estimates etc. and learning that it would have to be both the outside AND the inside blower unit, and all that would run about $6-7k, we found a good, local HVAC service company that can fix the compressor under warranty (which will still cost us about $1200 for labor and freon) and we’ll also be doing maintenance agreements for both our upstairs and downstairs units with them, which includes niceties as spring and fall visits. I only feel bad about leaving the very nice New HVAC Guy, who even told us he wouldn’t charge us his diagnostic fee because he wouldn’t do it under warranty.
I’m not sure exactly what the hit will be to our emergency fund, but I’m hopeful it won’t be much. It has not been a stellar month so far, we have gone over budget in a couple categories (and they’re all “fun money” categories, whoopsies, what can I say, it was a birthday month). I also haven’t made the bulk of our credit card snowball payments yet (minimums are all paid), so I have some budget tweaking ahead of me.
Obviously, I can use money that was ear marked for debt for the HVAC issues, as the debt snowball would have to be halted until the emergency fund was replaced anyway, so whether it comes from debt money or emergency money is kind of like pah-tay-toe and puh-tah-toe. We did have some money in a “home maintenance” category as well, but not $1200 worth. I may also relook at our “tuition” category and see if my husband knows if any of the summer or fall classes he will be taking will qualify for tuition reimbursement. I planned for both of them to NOT be eligible, so if a few of them are, then I may be able to pull some of what’s built up in that category. All in all, I’m hoping that we won’t have to pull out more than $500 from our e*trade account. Even so, April is not going to be a stellar month in terms of debt repayment.
But you know what? After looking at numbers ranging from $6,000 to $7,000 for entire new units? $1200 sounds like a dream come true!
And that damn mystery power bill is now SOLVED and soon to be RESOLVED!
-99k