The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Ask a Mustachian => Topic started by: Kaplin261 on May 31, 2016, 10:20:23 AM
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Last year my 20 year old heat pump/air conditioner bit the dust in the middle of summer in Richmond VA. Temperatures were high 90's and a RH of %100. We immediately got a quote to replace it and were shocked it would cost $6,000!!!!
After looking online I realized I could replace it myself for $2,000. It would take 8 days to get to us. My wife and I made the decision to endure a week of heat to earn a easy $4,000 and this would make us more mustachian!!
Well we barely survived that week, we were both irritable and did not get very much sleep. I ended installing the unit the same day we got it but had to wait a extra day to get some one to vacuum the line set and braze it all together.
So a year later it's still working great, however we just sold our house and had some issues. It turns out when we had no air conditioning for that week all of our interior wood trim absorbed moisture and expanded and breaking all calked/painted joints. Our home inspection flagged this and we were forced to have the issued examined by a expert. We also had to remove all the old calk and put new calk in and repaint the trim. The inspector estimated it at $2000, I fixed it for less then $200 however I sunk almost 20 hours of labor into it.
The point of this story is be cautious of what people recommend to save money. In our case we still came out ahead. However what if we read a mustachian article and felt like using the AC was a financial sin and for no other reason stopped using it? The couple hundred dollars we would saved would of been negated.
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OK, I have to say I'm deeply, deeply skeptical that that one week of no AC was the sole cause of your problems. I live in New England, where central AC is rare but weeks of 90F/100% humidity weather happen fairly regularly (though not as often as in Virginia). In 30 years of living in Massachusetts and New Hampshire I've never lived in a house with central AC (did live in Virginia for several years, and I wouldn't have gone without it there).
The house where I live now is 100 years old and has never had central air. It has been through many one-week periods of 90F/100% humidity, but it doesn't have mold problems. There *must* be some other factor at work or some of the problem must pre-date your DIY AC replacement.
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And its quite possible that it would've taken 8 days to either schedule an appointment or for the contractor to receive it and install it.
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It does seem like more is at play here. We grew up with only box fans and high heat and humidity. In a variety of aged homes. I can't imagine that happened to all of them.
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What I suspect is the wood was fairly dry due to air conditioning we had been using. We went from 40% RH to 100% RH. The temperature probably didn't have anything to do with it, it was just the humidity.
I also grew up with box fans and whole house fans, however the house I grew up in had hard wood trim and was stained and varnished but not painted and calked.