I’ve lived in my little historic bungalow for several years now.
When I bought it, I knew full well that the house needed some upgrades. But as rough as it was after a tenant and her dogs did their best to ruin the place, I still saw the charm and felt a sense of “home” when I passed it on the way to work.
I moved in during April, and at that time it had only evaporative cooling (affectionately called a swamp cooler by Arizona natives). The house had never been equipped with central air, so I made that upgrade before I did anything else. Silver Dollar Air installed it and Ted (the old owner of the company) told me at the time “you’ve got a lot of knob and tube wiring in the attic, so you may want to update the electrical before too long.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah… put it on the list,” I thought. I had learned early on not to run the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine at the same time, so no problem. The new a/c was working great and I had more pressing issues to deal with–windows needed to be replaced, bath and kitchen remodeled, backyard needed a patio and the front yard needed something other than… well… dirt. I added ‘new electrical’ to the bottom of the list and got to work on the others.
I sailed through that first summer with my new air conditioner. By the next summer, though, I was having problems with the condenser freezing up. Ted told me to turn it off for a couple of hours (an absolute eternity in August) and then restart it. That worked for a while but a couple of weeks later the compressor froze again. It was a pain in the neck, but only occasionally, and I was cool for the most part. (The wiring was still knob and tube, of course. I hadn’t made it that far down my to-do list yet.)
Tom eventually bought Ted’s successful company, and the poor guy inherited me as an existing client. My air conditioning woes worsened. New fan motors here and there, a new condenser, and countless cleanings with an acid solution just to get the unit through “one more summer.”
Last summer, I literally had to turn the a/c off every other day while the ice melted from the condenser unit on the west side of my home. Even when it thawed, the house stayed warm. I found myself relying more and more on the swamp cooler for comfort, but as the summer progressed and the temps and the dewpoint rose, the swamp cooler just couldn’t make the house comfortable.
So after spending the better part of the summer sleeping on the couch with a window a/c unit from Home Depot, I finally decided to do something about the electrical system. I hired one of the most unreliable and undependable electricians in the valley to do the work (don’t ask) but by February 2010 (I said don’t ask) I was finally free of the knob and tube landmines in the attic.
I used the swamp cooler when the weather started to warm this summer and it worked predictably well until the last week of June or so (I can usually get to mid-July without switching to a/c, but we had some early heat waves this year). Then I brought the window a/c unit out and installed it in the living room window.
I thought that I may as well give the big unit a chance and I actually wrote a note to myself on the day/time that I turned it on to see how long it would take before the unit froze. The note reads: June 24th 3:30 pm. It turned on normally and within a couple minutes cool air was blowing out the vents. “Hmm…” I thought. “So far so good.”
It’s currently 2:58 pm on July 23rd, one day short of a full month with NO a/c problems to speak of. (I just knocked on my wood desk. No sense tempting the fates.) It’s cooler today, but the system has worked beautifully through some blistering hot days in the past weeks.
So, while I’ve spent years believing that a “lemon a/c unit” was the entire problem, was it actually the electrical system that was giving me grief? Nothing else had changed since Tom, shaking his head, handed me a price sheet for a new unit last summer. Coincidence? Anyone?
