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

Great! Back to normal

 

You mean shiny?

 

By the end of the year, I'd say 50% of the truck will have been replaced! Since November 2021, it has gotten...

• New frame
• New brake lines
• New fuel lines
• New leaf springs
• New lower control arms
• New shock absorbers
• New alternator
• New PCV valve
• New cam cover gasket
• New passenger door
• The entire passenger side repainted
• New steering U-joint

 

New truck with a 155K mile motor that burns oil when pushed hard...

 

@6 gearT444E
@98tacoma27
@BkerChuck
@ColoradoTJ
@Plain Jane Taco
@steelcity2
@shakerhood
@Squatting Pigeon
@Taco critter
@TnShooter
@wilcam47

Does anybody remember the great heat pump fiasco of 2020? Specifically, it was my encounter with quite possibly the dumbest HVAC technician in Pennsylvania...

My grandma's old house was actually a very large condo, located in a neighborhood of 30 homes, with 10 buildings that each had 3 homes.

My grandma moved out in October 2019 and into her new home in Florida, leaving the home vacant for several months. COVID hit, and I was furloughed from work; I was bored, gas was cheaper than it had been in probably two decades, and I resorted to taking long drives in the Tacoma to clear my mind. My grandma's old house was about 40 minutes from my parents' house, and I'd driven there solo so many times in the last nine years that I could easily drive there and back without GPS assistance.

Driving up there to do twice-weekly security checks on my grandma's vacant house was the perfect excuse to get out, even though my parents and grandma didn't think it was necessary.

One time in April or May of 2020, they were proven wrong...

 

My grandma's house was an end unit in a 3-unit dwelling, and when I pulled into her driveway that day, I noticed a Ford Transit Connect from an HVAC company in the driveway of the middle unit. Hardly a big deal...

All of the houses have back decks, and these houses were all built in 1993-1997 so none of them have the original A/C units. My grandma's house has a Carrier system, and the neighbor in the middle unit has a York.

My grandma's heat pump is installed in such a way that it's literally right there if you step down from the neighbor's deck. A layperson could easily mistake this for being the neighbor's unit, but I would expect more from a supposedly trained professional who knew he was supposed to be working on a York...

So, I walk around the back of the house, and there's this Hispanic guy in a jumpsuit with the same name displayed on the van in the driveway, on his knees taking apart my Grandma's heat pump; I didn't suspect for one minute that he was up to no good, but my grandma's house had been vacant for like 7 or 8 months, the A/C was just under five years old at the time and had just time been serviced, and I knew nobody was supposed to be touching it.

I asked "What are you doing to my grandma's air-conditioner?"

He said he's been called out to service it, and I thought for a few seconds; I knew my grandma's neighbor very well and asked "Is your customer's name Delma So-and-so?" He said yes.

I politely told him that Delma had a York heat pump and pointed him to that York's location. He thanked me and put the service access panel back on the Carrier. This is not the end of the story...

 

I had no reason to believe he'd damaged anything, but I wanted to make sure. Unfortunately, I didn't have a key to the house or the code for the realtor's lockbox. I called my parents and my grandma, and in short order, my grandma's friend who lived around the corner showed up with the code for the lockbox.

We got into the house, and I fired up the A/C unit, only to find that it wasn't blowing cold. I didn't think there was any way in hell that this technician could have damaged the unit in such a way that it didn't produce cold air, and I suspected that something had simply been disconnected or unplugged; I ended up being right on the money, though due to the sheer incompetence of two different HVAC companies we wouldn't discover the problem until probably a month later...

So, the company whose tech had mistakenly started working on my Grandma's unit sent out another tech to do an inspection free of charge. If I had known they were going to do this, I would have driven up there to meet them and actually turned on the unit. I went back there a short time later and fired up the unit. Once again, it wasn't blowing cold...

The company whose tech had mistakenly worked on the unit refused to do anything else, so we called the company that had installed the Carrier back in 2015. Nobody could be there, but this tech was given the lockbox code. He turned on the unit, said everything was fine, and left...

 

So, somebody finally makes an offer on the house in probably June or July of 2020. In order to get a mortgage, the house has to be inspected. The home inspector turned on the A/C as part of the inspection, and it wasn't blowing cold!



The company that had done the install five years earlier was called once again, and they supposedly sent someone out again. My dad and I both drove up there (in separate vehicles because he was coming from work) to do a once over on the house before the new owner took delivery, and it was over 90 degrees in the house!

 

My dad called the HVAC company and they sent someone out for a third time. I told the tech what I thought the problem might be, specifically something disconnected inside the outdoor unit. As I stated before, I was right on the money...

The Carrier was never actually broken. When the dope from the other HVAC company had mistakenly started working on it, he had disconnected the wire for the reversing valve (again, this is a heat pump). The heat pump had last been used in HEAT mode the previous fall, so the reversing valve was in the "heat" position.

The thermostat was set to cool, but the reversing valve couldn't switch. We had this huge heat wave, and when the unit would turn on, it would continually run in heat mode until the compressor overheated and the built-in overload sensors shut it down to prevent total annihilation. The compressor would cool down and the unit would start back up, but since the reversing valve wire was unplugged it would just continue heating the house. This process repeated itself over the course of two or three days until it hit about 93 degrees, which is about what it was when my dad and I showed up.

It is ill-advised to run a heat pump in heat mode at temperatures above about 64 degrees, because when it's in heat mode the refrigerant will be hot and this can obviously damage the system. Thankfully, this was a fairly new unit with built-in failsafes that kept the compressor from roasting itself; I talked to a couple friends who knew more about HVAC than I do, and wa assured that the unit would likely be fine.

A day or two later, another guy was coming to hook up the propane for the long-dormant gas fireplace, and we had to meet him. My dad and I drove up to meet him. By then, the Carrier had gotten the house into the 70s; I believe I set the A/C to like 75 or so when the tech reconnected the reversing valve.

The home inspector signed off on the A/C working properly, the bank approved the mortgage, and the deal was completed. The one bad part of the whole deal is that aside from new kitchen appliances, new carpeting, and the aforementioned new heat pump, the house had not been significantly renovated since it's construction in 1994. My grandma bought the house in 2006 before the real estate bubble, and ended up losing a significant amount of money on the sale. If she'd waited another year or so to sell the house, she would have made a fortune!

 

@ABA180
@6 gearT444E
@98tacoma27
@ColoradoTJ
@Plain Jane Taco
@shakerhood
@Squatting Pigeon
@Taco critter
@TnShooter
@wilcam47

So we had an interesting start to the California family reunion. We flying on an Airbus 321neo from Philadelphia to San Francisco, first class!

It is currently a little after 9:45am, and our flight was supposed to take off at 8:45. The captain announced while everyone was still boarding that the computer was being cranky. At about 9am, the captain announced that the aircraft had been deemed unfit to fly and we would have deplane while they found another plane. We were back in the terminal for about twenty minutes when they they started boarding us again, on the same plane. One of the flight attendants told me that the problem has been fixed, so now we are supposed to take off at 10am and land in San Francisco at 1:10pm

 

First class!

 

Currently coming to y'all live from an Airbus somewhere in the Northeast!

 

Safe travels, Charlie!

 

@shakerhood prefers Boeing over Airbus. Which do you prefer? After this plane's little computer hiccup, I think I like Boeing better...

 

I like Boeing

 

This is bullshit!

 

Yikes

 

You probably won't like to hear this, but l prefer GE engines over RR.