New Furnace, Air Conditioner And A Dirty House

When the home inspector tells you that your HVAC system is running on borrowed time it's a scary thing.  You're constantly wondering when it's finally going to break down.  Each winter you turn it on hoping to get just one more season out of it.  Then the company that comes to service it threatens to shut you down because they say it's unsafe you know you have to do something about the problem.  Oh and did I mention that the Co2 detector went off?  So we did what every good homeowner should do....we researched all of the different options and spoke to numerous companies.  It would be so much easier if each company would tell you the same thing but each company offered a different product and different ways to set the system up oh and there was one company who wanted to make a large gaping hole in our laundry room and we'd have to get a drywall person to fix it up.  Ya that really made me want to hire that company....NOT!  Some of my research included watching far too many episodes of Holmes on Homes which only made the problem worse because now we were scared to hire anyone for fear of making the wrong decision.  We did learn a few things about building to code (never allowing the contractor to put the off gas pipe near a window because all of the gas will enter the house and poison the air, have the pipe high enough off the ground so that bugs and animals do not get in) oh and we learned the difference between a one stage furnace and a two stage furnace.  And if the learning curve on the furnace wasn't enough we also needed a new air conditioner.  It was all more than we bargained for.

After much deliberation we settled on a company called Husky.  Their price was right since they had a lot of rebates and incentives and they had a good rating on a website called Home Stars we decided to hire them to do the job.  By the way, Home Stars is a great place to look if you are about to hire a contractor or company to do any work.  People will rate the companies and tell you what they really think and some of the ratings are brutally honest.  They came the other day first thing in the morning to do the installation and were there until just after 6:00 p.m..  First they had to remove the old furnace and air conditioner and the old pipes and then install the new units and new pipes.  By the end of the day we had a brand new furnace and air conditioner and one very messy muddy house.  This company left muddy wet foot prints throughout the entire lower portion of the house and two dirty washrooms.  We were happy with their work but their cleanliness left a lot to be desired even though they did put drop clothes down it would have been nice if they has those little booties to cover their shoes or even attempted to clean up after themselves.  One thing that I didn't like about the company was that they didn't test the air conditioner.  Since it's the middle of winter so we have no way of knowing if it even works properly.  I really didn't think that was very professional at all.  I guess we will see in the summer if it works or not and if it doesn't they'll have to come back to replace it.

All in all, owning a home is a really big learning experience.  So far we learning that our wiring was not to code and could have caused a fire.  Great, so we hired an electrician to take care of that.  Junction boxes with extension cords leading to nothing is a no no and we had a ton of junction boxes and illegal wiring.  The home inspector missed it.  Then we learned that our plumbing is old and not in good shape.  We hired a plumber and after many visits many of the issues are now fixed.  The home inspector missed that too.  Why the previous homeowner put a drinking straw down the kitchen drain is beyond me, but they did.  There are so many things still left to do.  It just never ends!