PennSilverTaco's HVAC BS MegaThread!

My Grandma's house in New Jersey was built in 1947. She and my late grandpa bought the house in like 1974 or 1975. The house has been renovated from top to bottom, had the garage turned into a living room, and been retrofitted with central air, but the original oil boiler from 1947 managed to last all this time. It died two weeks ago, after 75 years of largely trouble-free service!

It was a Thatcher, and I highly doubt that company still exists. The most cost effective option was to connect the house to public natural gas, and install a gas boiler. My grandma got a Weil-McLane boiler, and the house has had propane for the range/oven, fireplace, dryer, and water heater for many years. She is leaving all of those the way they are for now, but had them run gas lines to all of those appliances in case she does choose to convert.

She was without heat for two weeks, but she toughed it out. The new Weil-McLane boiler is installed and operational, but it was discovered during the install that the early postwar Thatcher contains asbestos. As if it wasn't bad enough that the boiler is estimated to weight about 800 pounds and is virtually impossible to move, a special asbestos removal team with specialized PPE must come in and dismantle the damn thing!

 

A little bit of research confirmed that Thatcher no longer exists. The company was founded in the 19th century, and struggled through the Grear Depression but ultimately survived, ceasing operations in 1968 (about 7 years before my grandparents bought the house).

https://jerseyhistory.org/guide-to-the-thatcher-furnace-company-papers-1882-1968mg-1647/

 

Run capacitor for blower motor/squirrel cage?

 

that seems likely, The malfunction occurred at 11 pm i was awakened by my wife at 4 am. When fiddling with the heater unit the fan motor was not cold like the rest of the attic before i started the reset process.

i think im going to replace the Cap anyway and see if this issue pops up again. just need to match the specs and ill be good to go

 

pulled the spec off the cap but it has a 15 in sharpie written on it that i would have assumed was the date. Little strange since we moved in 2014 and have not had anyone service the unit or any issues.

 

Maybe MFD doesn't mean "manufacture date" in this case?

 

@shakerhood
@StandardTaco

Do your houses have 80% or 90% efficiency furnaces? An easy way to tell is what type of flue pipe it has. If it has a metal flue pipe, then it's an 80-percenter, while a white PVC pipe means it's a 90-percenter. A 90% efficency furnace is also known as a condensing furnace, and is obviously more efficient than a 80% furnace.

 

Only gas furnaces are available in 90% and above, and they make up the majority of new furnaces manufactured today. New 80% furnaces installed today generally replace old 80% furnaces existing homes. My aunt's townhouse was built in 2008-2009 and has a builder grade Lennox 13 SEER A/C matched with a Lennox 80% gas furnace; I was surprised when I first visited that house in 2009 right after my aunt bought it, as it was newest house I'd ever seen with an 80% furnace. I can tell you that every single house my parents have ever owned since late 1990 has has had central air and gas forced air heat.

The first house my parents bought together before I was born, in Northern California, did not have A/C and my dad believes it had electric baseboard heat. The shitty Navy-owned WWII-era house in California that we lived in from August 1996 to March 1997 had a wall-mounted electric heater with a fan to circulate the heat throughout the house. We didn't even use the thing because temperatures were so mild. The second Navy house we lived in, from March 1997 to about June 1998, was built in the 1960s and I honestly have no idea what kind of heat it had. We have lived in so many houses since I was born that memories blend together and I may be confusing it with another house, but I vaguely seem to remember that it had vent registers in the floor. Neither of the government houses in NorCal had air-conditioning because it wasn't really needed, and the government wanted to cut spending wherever it could, but it is entiely possible that the second place we lived in had gas heat.

My parents rented a house in Oak Harbor, Washington when my dad was stationed at NAS Whidbey Island from 2000 to 2002. That house was built in 1988 and had gas forced air heat, but no central air. Central A/C could easily be added, but almost no houses out there had it because it really wasn't needed but a few days out of the year.

The rental house in Doylestown, Pennsylvania had central air and oil forced air heat. We lived there from 2005 to 2007.

 

Yeah the old one was metal but the new one uses the PVC

 

oh thats Microfarad or the rating on the cap. the 15 in a sharpie i was referencing was written on the top where the connectors are. maybe they just wrote that to reference the farad rating? who knows.

 

My parents sold their first home in Milpitas, California in 1990 after barely two years of ownership and made a tidy profit. My parents bought that house in early 1988 for $190K, they sold it in 1990 for $250K, and I believe the last time I checked the value on Zillow it was worth close to $2 million.

That said, I was scared of split-system central air-conditioners well into the 1990s, because they tended to be noisy and one of my sensory issues with autism was a dislike of loud of noises. I paid literally no attention to what kind of heating system any of our houses had until 2005, when we moved into the rental place with oil heat.

The house that my parents bought new in 1990 and owned probably had a 90% furnace, but the place in Virginia Beach likely had an 80% efficiency furnace because I believe that house had a horizontal furnace up in the attic and those only come in 80%. The house in Northern Virginia most definitely had an 80% efficiency furnace, because that house was very cheaply built and my dad's Navy buddy's house a few miles away in the same area also had an 80% furnace.

The townhouse in Furlong was built in 2007 and had dual 90% efficiency gas furnaces, as does our current house which was built in 2015-2016.

 

Did you buy the house new?

 

negative, its was built in the 80s has an 80% efficiency furnace in the attic.

 

I'm thinking that "15" on the capacitor has nothing to do with the year. You bought the house in 2014 and it came with the current system, correct?

My aunt lives in Decatur and her old townhouse has a heat pump. It was really struggling over Christmas weekend, and she was so afraid of her pipes freezing that she cranked it up to like 74 degrees.

 

our neighbors pumped it up to 75. we normally keep the house at 65 and when working the 2 stage gas furnace seems to work fine.

 

I'm guessing your neighbor also has gas heat? The thing with heat pumps is they are more efficient than fossil fuel furnaces when it's above 35 degrees, but once it gets below that they can't extract heat from the outdoor air as efficiently and the electric backup heat often has to kick in. This where it gets expensive...



The beauty of a gas or oil furnace is that it creates no matter what the temperature is. There is ambient heat in the air down to absolute zero (equal to -459.67 degrees Fahrenheit), but even the newest split-system air-source heat pumps just can't compare to even the most oldest most inefficient furnace or boiler when it gets really cold. My grandma's house in New Jersey was built in 1947, and has been extensively renovated. However, the original Thatcher oil boiler just died two weeks ago. She had the house tied into public natural gas and had a gas boiler installed. The old boiler heated the house efficiently, with minimal service performed on it, for three quarters of a century. I'm told that the new gas boiler is a Weil-McLane, which is a damn good product whether you have gas or oil, but I guarantee you that no new boiler installed today is going to be functioning in December 2097.

 

@auskip07

So, I'm guessing your house is on a crawlspace (no traditional basement) with all of the HVAC vents in the ceiling? That is the best way to do it, especially if you have 2-story home with only one HVAC system. Is your house one or two stories?

 

Slab on grade, 2 story 1600 sqft. registers in ceilings, central return.

 

That's like the perfect setup, though I can't imagine that accessing the furnace is a particularly easy job; I hope the filter is easily accesible!

 

once i broke the knob on the power switch it was easily accessible. not very confident that the condensate pump running to the plumbing vent pipe is code