Replacing the central Heat and Air Conditioning system

 Our current A/C system is a Lennox system that was installed in 2002.  We had a lot of trouble with it after it was first installed.  It seemed that every year there was on major problem after another.  But they were all mostly under warranty.  But it was clearly not a reliable system.  The first A/C system had come with the house, so it was 16 years old when it needed to be replaced.  This Lennox system did not appear that it would last past its 10-year warranty. 

As it got older, the frequency of major repairs decreased.  Still, we expected to replace it as soon as it died after the warranty expired. No more throwing good repair money after an unreliable system.  The warranty expired in 2012.  By 2016, I figured it was bound to be on its last legs, so I contacted three A/C companies and got quotes.

Finally, in 2020, it died.  But it did make it thru the summer and waited until the middle of October before I came home from a walk, noticed the house was warmer than I thought it should be.  The fan was running full speed, but the air was not cold; not even cool. Stan's Heating, Air & Plumbing came out the next day and determined that their was no coolant in the A/C coils.  Since it had been working well just the day before, it apparently had suddenly sprung a leak, somewhere.  Putting new coolant in the coils would not fix the problem; it would just leak out again.

So we went back to our estimates.  Unfortunately, they were 4 years old now.  We had been quoting a Trane system.  One of the companies did not even carry Trane anymore.  So we went to the Trane website to find the Trane shops in Austin.  One of them, Service Wizard, had been positively mentioned on NextDoor enough that I remembered it.  I called them; got another estimate, and that estimate was in line with the earlier estimates, so we went with that.

We were quoted a 5 Ton Trane XV20i with an XV80 Gas furnace, around 20 SEER. Extras were a Honeywell 4" media air cleaner and an in-line duct booster.  A duct booster is basically a fan that sits in the duct work and blows more air thru it.  That was selected as the way to handle the problem that the East side of the house (with the kitchen) is typically much warmer than the West side (with the thermostat).  (The correct solution to this is a two-zone system, but that would require a substantial tear out and replace of the duct work, and a whole new A/C system (and place for it) for the East side.)

The first hitch was that the furnace was not available.  For whatever reason, it would be at least two weeks before a furnace was here.  But the weather almost no longer needed A/C, so we could wait.  After all the old gas furnace still worked if it got too cold (which it did).

Finally, the furnace unit arrived, and we were scheduled for installation on 3 Nov.  On 2 Nov, I went up in the attic and cleared the insulation away from where the booster fan would be installed.

And since they would need to run a control wire from the new A/C system to the booster fan, I cleared out the insulation above the utility closet in the hallway.

The second hitch came on the morning of 3 Nov, while I was waiting for them to come install the system.  One of the owners said that the new system was top of the line, and all digital.  Which meant that they could not get a signal out of the system to indicate that the fan was running that would control a booster fan.  They could put a booster fan in the duct work, but it would need to be turned on and off manually, which made no sense to me.  So we dropped the idea of the booster fan.  We currently get that effect by having a 20 inch box fan sitting on the floor in the living room; it effectively runs all day.

Once that was settled, the workmen arrived about 9:00 AM.  First they took the old system out.

and put in the new one.

This is Model No. 4YXCC009DS3HCAA, Serial No. 20403L0FCG.

Similarly they removed the outside Lennox system and put in the new Trane condenser.  That seems to be Model No. 4TTV0060A1000CD, Serial No. 20401L7T1F.

They had to replace the electrical box on the wall behind the condenser.

And we have to use the Trane thermostat.

which is a touch screen with a whole bunch of menu options.

The Nest thermostat that we installed in March is no longer needed.

This whole system cost $12,282.00 from Service Wizard Heating and Air Conditioning, and includes a 10-year parts warranty, but only a 1-year labor warranty.  Registering the whole system at Trane.com says the warranty expires 11/03/2030, except for the compressor which goes another 2 years to 2032.

Update from 22 Nov 2020.  Since the booster fan was not installed, the effort to clean up the attic and expose the duct work was unnecessary, and reversed.  In doing so, we went and bought even more insulation -- unfaced R30 fiberglass batts -- and installed one roll over the dining room

and the other over the closet that holds the A/C and furnace unit covering all that duct work under feet of fiberglass insulation.

Update, 4 March 2022.

I had Fox Service Company come out and do an inspection and maintenance of the  A/C Cooling system. $69.  There were a couple of issues.  The motor is sealed, the drain pan is sealed in the upflow above the condenser, and the exterior capacitor is an invertor, so those could not be inspected.  I'm not sure if that is because the system was designed to not need maintenance or if there are special techniques that only Trane service people know.  But in all, it passed all inspections and should be good to go for another year.

Replacing a washer in the central bathroom shower

 We've noticed that the central bathroom shower/tub hot water is difficult to turn off completely.  So we suspect that the washer in the shower "Hot" stem needs to be replaced.

We first turn the water to the entire house off (out by the water meter) so that we can work without leaks.

We first remove the cold water handle, escutcheon, and stem.

That gets us access to the washer, at the bottom of the stem.  The washer is held on with a screw.

We have a partial package of 3/8L Beveled Washers, and that seems to fit the stem, so we use them.  

We reverse the process for the cold water to reassemble it.  Then we repeat for the hot water. Then we can turn the water back on out by the driveway, and we have new washers for both stems.

Digging up the back half of the front yard, Part 6

 The pile of dirt from digging has filled much of the trench that is "done" and we have more coming, so we used the jack hammer to smooth out the bottom of more of the trench from the dirt pile towards the street.

Then we turned our attention to the stump, and used the jack hammer to excavate deeper both on the side closest to the house and sidewalk,

The side of the stump closest to the street had two very large white hard limestone under it, not the crumbly porous limestone that was on the other side (and in the trench that we saw earlier in this post).

We broke those rocks up, so that we will be able to move them out.

A couple of days of moving the rock that was loosened by the jack hammer and we have a pretty clean bottom up near the head of the trench.

Notice however that around the edges, the lower 6 to 12 inches appear to be rock.  So either we haven't gone far enough to reach the area that we excavated last year, or we have gone down further than we did last year.

An exploratory dig into the corner, and along the side 

shows that we apparently have gone down further than last year.  It looks to me that last year, with the front section of the yard to excavate, we followed the rough contour of the land -- sloping up slowly towards the street.  But with this year's digging, we have kept it pretty flat.  The net is that there is a step up of about 6 to 9 inches between the back half and front half of the yard.

Proper Name Plates for the Cats

When we put Chibi in the back yard (Zone 2), we had some difficulty determining where the various cats (Inari, Jita, and Pepper) were.  So it seemed that it would help if we had markers for each of them.

We found a place on Etsy that would manufacture brass name plates for us, UnbanDecor (you can reach them at mtaukeer012@gmail.com) and had them make up 5 name plates, for about $100 apiece:

Pepper, Inari, Neko Jita, Chibi, and Sasha.

(Neko Jita is Jita's full and proper name; Sasha is still alive, but at 17, it is expected she will need a name plate within a couple of years.)

 These are hand-cast brass name plates.  The hole on each end is perfect for a #8 screw.

We used the photos from the blog to locate the various cats and then marked on the house foundation wall where each name plate should go. 

Mounting the name plates was planned to be easy.  A hole would be drilled into the concrete foundation for the two screws for each name plate.  A plastic anchor would be inserted into the hole, and then a #8 round-head stainless steel screw would be put thru the hole and into the plastic anchor.  In addition, we would put "liquid nails", an industrial indoor-outdoor adhesive, on the back of the name plate.

The problem was drilling the hole.  The foundation is covered with a thin layer (maybe 1/4 inch) of mortar (parging).  I got a special drill bit specifically for drilling into concrete.  It went thru the parge easily, but would not, could not, make much of a dent into the foundation.  (I guess this is good -- we have a really strong, solid foundation.)

As a result, the liquid nails is the main thing holding the name plates in place.

From the left, the name plates are for Inari

Pepper

Jita

and Chibi

We will go back another day and clean off our marks and possibly seal around each name plate with mortar, but we will give it some time for the liquid nails to dry properly.

Digging up the back half of the front yard, Part 5

 We used the jackhammer to break up the rock both in the trench, towards the street, and around the base of the stump.

This gets us to a level about 9 to 12 inches below the stump.

We can then continue to dig out the dirt from around the stump.

And slowly work our way around the stump.

Taking out rock and roots as we go.

until we have the stump and its roots pretty well exposed.

This produces both a lot of rock, which we are disposing of, and a lot of dirt.  The dirt gets mixed with leaves and grass, and then piled up.  Initially we were carting it up and onto the part of the front yard that has already been dug up, in the front.

but that area is pretty well filled up at this point, from the sidewalk to the street to the mailbox all the way back to where we are digging.  So we started to fill in a small corner of the trench which was pretty well done.

but now we have pretty well filled that area up too.

Trouble with a Bradford Pear Tree

 Yesterday was a quiet and peaceful day, but when we got up this morning, there was a tree (branch) in our driveway!

The limb had just given way.

So, we used a pair of loppers and a chain saw to trim it all down and then cut it up.

This left a pile of branches and wood pieces that we will need to get rid of but it moved it off of the driveway.

We may need to do something to seal over the spot where it broke off, and the neighbor suggested we may need to take the next branch up from this off too, but for now ...

Digging up the back half of the front yard, Part 4

 Eventually, we got the basic trench all the way to the back of the yard, up against the wall that we built last year.

Now we turn and start digging along the wall to the other side of the tree stump.

And then we turn and dig towards the stump itself.

The top layer of dirt is what we brought in last year.  Below that is the mix of leaves and dirt that we dug up, and below that is the layer that the roots grow thru.  The roots have a relatively narrow layer of dirt to grow in, maybe 8 inches deep.  Below that is a layer of rock.  Crumbly rock, but rock. So if we dig into the 8 inches of dirt just above the underlying rock layer, we find the tree roots.

Removing the roots -- using an axe and a chainsaw as necessary -- gives us a thin layer of dirt to scrape off.

And shoveling that dirt out of the trench (and into the growing dirt pile by the street) exposes a layer of rock that we will need the jackhammer to break up and remove.

As we dug the dirt up and separated out the rocks, we added leaves and grass to increase the organic content of the dirt, trying to make it good soil instead of just plain dirt.  We got bags of leaves from the neighbors, but now have used all of those up.  We stored the leaves at the far end of the trench, but now it is fully exposed, and we see there is also a layer of rock to remove from the other end of the trench.

Chibi

 

Chibi was one of Kathryn's cats, but developed cancer.  So she joins Inari and Jita and Pepper in Zone 2.

Zone 2 has filled out a lot since Inari and Jita were buried in 2014, but we continued along the kitchen/garage wall.  This put us into the Monkey Grass.

But Monkey Grass is resilient so we expect it will fill back in, over time.

Digging up the back half of the front yard, Part 3

 Digging up the rest of the front yard will be difficult.  There is no shade now that the tree has been cut down.  So we will need a sun shade.  Luckily, we have one left over from a beach trip about 20 years ago.

Then we can start digging.  First we need to find the sides of the area that we dug up before.  So we start digging in what we think is a corner of the part yet to be dug up, trying to find the edges.  We were badly off, but eventually we find what we think are the edges -- no big rocks in the dirt, the dirt is fairly soft to dig, and uniform in composition.

Now it's just day by day making this pit a bit larger.  Finding big rocks as we do and pulling them out.

Repeat and repeat.

Widening the hole.

Removing the rocks, and the dirt, and then digging further and deeper.