PennSilverTaco's "Perfect 5-Lug Regular Cab" Build, Aspergers, and General BS MegaThread!

Believe what you want boss. I live my life, and have the proof.

 

Yeah natural gas is not too plentiful around here, I only recall seeing it available in a few areas. The propane is on a budget for me, I pay for 10 months and get 2 months off and it will be anywhere from $80 - $120 per month depending on the year.

 

I want a house with gas appliances. I want the ability to heat and cook if there’s a black out

 

When my aunt and uncle renovated the house, they asked my cousin if he wanted a ceiling fan in his bedroom. For some stupid reason, he said no; And his room was actually the coolest in the house!

My other cousin's room was above the garage, so it was miserable in the summer!

 

Until I was about eight, I was a bit scared of central air-conditioners because they tended to be noisy (Aspies generally do not like loud noises, especially when they are younger). In the early 1990s (1992 or so), my parents looked at new homes just for fun. In this particular case, it was townhomes. The salespeople took us to look at some of the completed spec houses, and I can remember that these houses had the venerable York Stellar Series A/C units. We were all the way on the sidewalk, and I can remember clinging to my dad for dear life when one of those units turned on. Throughout the 1990s, I was scared of the following because of their relatively loud (to me) noises:

• Central air-conditioners and heat pumps.
• Heavy-duty pressure-flush toilets commonly found in schools and commercial buildings.
• Automatic toilets.
• My dad's boat when he tested tested the 60hp Johnson outboard out of the water (it was 2-stroke so it had to be run with a garden hose connected to it).
  
• My uncle's 1978 Harley-Davidson.*

*At the same time I was terrified of my uncle's Harley, I was not scared in the slightest of my dad's 1999 Harley FXDX and regularly went for rides on it!

 

The same aunt and uncle who owned the house in NoVa with the underpowered Trane XE1000 previously owned a house in Maryland that also had a heat pump. They bought the house new in 1987*, before I was born, and sold it in 1994 when they moved to Virginia. I have stated many times here on TW that I was terrified of the York heat pump in the backyard of the Maryland house, and that I refused to play with my cousins in the backyard when that damn thing was running.

*The Maryland house was a decorated model, so it may have actually been built in 1985-1986. However, it had never been lived in before; My aunt and uncle were the first owners.

 

My dad's Navy buddy lives in the Cincinnati suburbs; His house was built in the 1980s and I do believe it has a heat pump.

 

You will not be able to run the furnace without electricity, but the water heater will still work as long as there's water in it! However, I do believe the WH needs electricity to refill the tank.

 

I would also like to have a whole house generator set up too.

 

I have a portable generator here, right now imrun extension cords but am going to have a transfer switch installed so I can choose which circuits to run.

 

Ask @kakwvu he knows me personally

 

Yeah, can’t even load his own damn skids up

 

So how did you invest so much money by the age of 33 to live the rest of your life? Point me in the right direction. I’d like to retire before I’m 30

 

Right place, right time. And a lot of shit he’d done that wasn’t the right place.

 

Makes no sense. So spill the beans

 

My aunt and uncle's house was built in 1981, at a time when oil was expensive and natural gas was unavailable in that area. The neighborhood is pretty well out in the boonies, so all the houses also have septic tanks (they do have public water though). Since oil was expensive, the most economical choice at the time was a lousy heat pump. What generally happens when you install a heat pump anywhere farther North than Jacksonville is you get a heating system that absolutely sucks. However, I could personally make do with a heat pump as I prefer it below 70 degrees in the house even in the dead of winter; Where the builder fucked up was only installing one system! Even two decades into the 21st century, I still see heat pumps from the 1970s in operation in my area (Southeast PA). What old air-conditioners and heat pumps (especially heat pumps) lack in efficiency, they more than make up for in raw, just-will-not-die durability.

I remember being at my aunt and uncle's house in 1996-1997, and I can tell you that the heat pump the house at the time was either tan or white in color, and the cabinet design was completely squared off in design. In the early 1980s, when most air-conditioners and heat pumps were more rounded off (or completely rounded off in the case of all Carrier units made prior to 1989), only one company made square units that were tan/white in color; Trane! From the late 1960s to the very early 1980s, these were sold as General Electric units. I forget when Trane merged with GE, but from what I have seen all products were branded as Trane from 1984 onward. The newest General Electric-branded "Trane" product I've ever seen personally had a manufacture date of 1983.

GE products looked identical to the earliest Trane products, and my aunt told me that believed the original heat pump was a Trane, so I'm assuming it was a GE...

The wintertime performance of the 2001 Trane XE1000 was so poor that until I took the time to read the data plate and the manufacture date, I believed the XE1000 was original to the house. The then-top-of-the-line XL1200 was released in 1986, but the oldest XE-series I've ever seen was 1987 model. I can only assume that the XE-series debuted alongside the XL-series, and basically what I'm trying to say is that the XE-series did not enter production until at least five years after my aunt and uncle's old house was built. The newest GE-style Trane I've ever seen was a 1986 model if I remember correctly, so there was some production overlap just like the Toyota pickup and the Tacoma in 1995.

My aunt told me almost twenty years after they'd bought the house that every HVAC component had been replaced at least once, and at separate times. By 2013-2014, the system consisted of a 2001 Trane XE1000 Weathertron heat pump, a 2006 Trane variable-speed air handler. Since they were both Trane products and both used R-22 refrigerant, it was okay to match the 2001 Trane heat pump with the 1981 Trane air handler (it is actually acceptable to mix and match different brands of indoor unit and outdoor unit as long as they are similar size and use the same refrigerant).

 

I took my college money and put a down payment on a house in Kailua, Oahu in 2005 since I was in the military and college was paid for. 2 years later a housing boom hit that area and made me triple my initial investment. My grandmother has handle my investments my whole life every time for my birthday, Christmas, graduation, conformation she bought me stocks as gifts. I did really well in real estate development in Honolulu Hawaii for 10 years while I worked for the government and when I was in college. I have a wonderful investment account and a pension from the government. I make a great amount of money from everything I have going on so I don’t have to work. The Hawaii housing boom and development really hooked it up honestly.

 

Currently selling my home in Hawaii right now for a hell of a lot more then I paid for it 4 years ago.

 

In the house that was built in 1981, the heat pump was located on the side of the house (as it is in most single-family homes in North America). It was surrounded by trees, and my cousins loved to built forts back there and play...

This particular year, there had been an explosion of this particular species of caterpillar, and the three of us spend a good chunk of that visit catching bugs (especially the caterpillars). There were tons of bugs, including the caterpillars, in the air-conditioner alcove.

During the visit there in the summer of 1997, I was eight years old and still quite small for my age; To a small eight-year old who had been afraid of air-conditioners in his earlier years, a 5-nominal ton air-conditioner was quite imposing. I hunted bugs with my cousins in their makeshift fort, but I constantly expressed concern about the air-conditioner* turning on and annoyed them greatly in the process.

It never turned on during the time we were back there, and it would be another five years before we lived within easy driving distance of them, so I had grown out of my irrational fear of air-conditioners by the time we moved back there. Even by the winter of 1998, just one year after the great bug hunt of '97, I paid the heat pump no attention. We lived in California from 1996 to 1998, so the 1997 trip was a rare treat. We lived in Virginia Beach, about three hours away, from 1998 to 2000. We moved back across the country to Washington in 2000 and lived there until 2002. When we moved to Northern Virginia in 2002, and thus lived a half hour from them, I was at that house almost every weekend for the three years we lived there. We moved three hours away to Pennsylvania in 2005, but I showed no interest in the heat pump from 2002 (when it was replaced for the first time) to 2007. Then, in 2007 or so, I started developing an interest in HVAC and asked my aunt what type of heating system the house had. My parents had never owned or rented a house with a heat pump, and I had no idea what one was, so I asked my aunt if her house had gas or oil heat. She told me it had a heat pump, but even she didn't fully know what a heat pump was with the exception of three things:

• A heat pump worked just like an air-conditioner in the summer.
• Unlike a straight-cool A/C unit, a heat pump also ran in the winter.
  
• A heat pump absolutely sucked in terms of heating performance.

Even I didn't fully understand how a heat pump worked until 2009 or so (I seriously thought it was as simple as the fan blades changing direction). Needless to say, I still knew that a heat pump had to defrost when running in heat mode, and under proper conditions it would produce one hell of a steam show. We went there for Thanksgiving in 2008. My aunt and uncle had a Yellow Lab named Sandy, and we had a Black Lab named Molly (Both of whom were 13 years old at the time). The backyard was not fenced during the time my aunt and uncle lived there, so it was not possible to simply let the dogs out and wait until they scratched at the door to come in. The unwritten rule for years had been that the first person to wake up had to take the dogs out; This was almost always yours truly...

Molly and Sandy were senior citizens by dog standards, but they were still fairly large and my mom generally forbade me from walking both dogs at once. As such, I always walked my dog first and then took Sandy out. On this particularly cold November morning, I took Sandy around the block, and as I approached the house I immediately noticed that the heat pump was making a strange noise I'd never heard it make before. That was the year I'd gotten a digital camera for my birthday, and I made sure I always had it with me. I immediately realized the heat pump had to be defrosting, and bolted from the street to the side of the house, dragging poor Sandy behind me. Sure enough, the heat pump was at the end of a defrost cycle, and I'd caught a steam show! I switched on the camera and started recording. Unfortunately, I'd caught the heat pump at the end of the cycle and I probably got less than a minute of steam show footage before the Trane switched backed into heat mode. The video was like a minute and three seconds, and ended up being one of my most popular early YouTube videos!

 

@PennSilverTaco i have completely ruled out a heat pump at this point in my home search