PennSilverTaco's HVAC BS MegaThread!

I wasn't the only one who applied for that job, and someone else's background check came back quicker, so that job is off the table for the time being; I did, however, find an HVAC tech who is willing to give me decommissioned central A/C units for free...

 

@Gwyns04 informed me of these two nonfunctional mini fridges in her neighborhood yesterday, and I got them!

 

More stuff that I had no idea had any value.
Just help the neighbor load one up to take to the dump.

 

Compressor has to be removed or else the scrapyard I go to charges an "environmental fee", even if there is no refrigerant in it; I also get every last bit of copper...

 

I also got an old box fan in Friday's load...

 

Copper guts from the two mini fridges...

 

And the compressors...

 

@Lt. Dangle

I got my hands on a complete 1997 Trane A/C and heating system (4-ton A/C and 90% gas furnace) today...

 

Yooo….. It’s a Pearl Jam fan.
I dig it…….NICE.

 

Pearl Jam?

 

@Lt. Dangle

What is your opinion of the York Affinity Series? I used to think they were pretty good after seeing them for the first time in June 2008. My mom's side of the family rented a beachfront home in Virginia Beach for a family reunion in June 2008, and that whole house was outdated 1970s time warp, except for the HVAC system. The units had just been replaced prior to us renting the place. They were York Affinity 3S heat pumps, one for upstairs and one for downstairs. On our first day there, the rental management company had to send the tech out because a piece of styrofoam from shipping had gotten wedged in the condenser fan and was hindering operation. That was addressed quickly.

It was hot as hell that week, and the Great Dismal Swamp also happened to be on fire, so there an almost constant haziness and smoky smell when you went outside. Tose two Yorks performed flawlessly, and they were very quiet.

My grandma's neighbors in the neighborhood where she used to live had a York Affinity 2S heat pump from 2004. The number designates the SEER; 2S means 12 SEER, which went out of production after 2005 due to government mandates on HVAC efficiency. I do not remember if that unit was R-22 or R410; I know Carrier first started making R410a units in 1996 under the name "Puron", but the oldest R410a unit that I have ever personally seen my friend's parents' 2003 Dave Lennox Signature Series 2.5-ton A/C, which as of June 2024 is still going strong!

3S, which is what the rental beach house had, means 13 SEER; 15S is a 15 SEER and 8S is an 18 SEER. I believe the 3S had a single-stage compressor, but the higher-SEER units could be had with 2-stage or variable-speed; I'm assuming York products have Copeland Scroll compressors.

Anyway, the Affinity 2S at my grandma's neighbors' house shit the bed after less than a decade; I believe the coil developed a leak, but I don't remember. It may have been the compressor; I don't remember if these people were the original owners, but they'd replaced the original heat pump with York Affinity in 2004. Disgusted that it didn't even last a decade, they went with a Trane XL-series as a replacement. That would have been 2013 or 2014 when the York was replaced, and the Trane XL was still there when my grandma sold the house in 2020. A buddy of mine who is more obsessed with HVAC than I am says that York Affinity units rarely last more than a decade; I know of two Affinity heat pumps at a commercial property in Doylestown that are at least fifteen years old and still going strong, but he does make a point; I almost never see houses with York Affinity units. There are a couple builders who use York equipment, but it's either the base model Latitude Series or the mid-grade LX Series. The Latitude Series, LX Series, and Affinity Series names seemed to have been phased out before COVID, as York brands all model lineups with a confusing mishmash of letters and numbers.

In my opinion, York has not been of particularly good quality in about twenty years; I believe that the Stellar Series was produced until 2005 (I've never seen a Stellar newer than 2005). My girlfriend's neighbor has a house that was built in 1958, which they bought over 40 years ago. The house did not originally have central air, and they installed a York Stellar A/C system in 1985. That unit is still going strong!

So yeah, the only time you'd ever see me settling for York is if I bought a brand new house and that's what it came with. What's your opinion on York?

 

@Lt. Dangle

I found the picture of my girlfriend's neighbors' central A/C, which was installed new in 1985 and as of this post is still going strong!

 

The name on the fan.
I got about 10 years on you Charlie.
Pearl Jam was a big band in the 90's.
I bet @ABA180 knows who they are?

https://youtu.be/q90DPCu_-zk?si=jtBiyriYjV9tFLiH

 

Yup, I was 19-20 when that album dropped. Also the name of a wrestling move..the Evenflow DDT as used by Raven in ECW

 

I know who Pearl Jam is...



I hear this song on the radio in the my truck all the time too; I just didn't realize it was Pearl Jam...

 

Believe it or not, I have no memory of ever working on one of these. York does not have a real strong presence here.

I have never been impressed with the brand as their engineering was always subpar IMO.

Carrier Puron AC Select Comfort or whatever it was called were good units. Looked like this:

They were also made as R22 units.

I loved them. I started with a Carrier dealer in '98 that was deep into Puron even at that point so I have tons of experience on it and when I switched to a smaller Lennox Dealer in '04. I was far and away their best 410 Tech as no one there had seen it at that point lol. The installers there were still purging and pressure testing with R22 and I had to get the parts manager to start ordering Nitrogen for proper leak testing and purging. I couldn't believe it lol.

Weirdly the Parts Mgr and Service Mgr loved me as I forced their current techs to get their shit together. Not that I was anything special, I just couldn't stop telling the guys why using refrigerant for pressure testing was a bad idea, even when R22 was cheap. The shop had a lot of good ole boys who had done it the same way for years, I wasn't having any of that.

I laso got to explain subcooling and superheat to them as they just went with pressure readings haha, it was like the wild west.

 

The unit you speak of would be the Carrier TECH2000, which was manufactured from 1989 to 2005, and replaced the venerable "Round One". The Infinity System replaced the TECH2000 in 2006, and the Infinity is still in production; I think R-22 cools better than R410a, at least in window units. That shitty old Amana that I got for free blew colder than my 2023 LG window A/C!

 

R-22 and R410a are not compatible due to different refrigerant oils, and I believe that R410a operates at a higher pressure...?

Are you telling me that these morons were pressure-testing R410a systems with R-22?!?!

 

@Lt. Dangle

The only decorated model in the DeLuca-built 55+ neighborhood is the 2,404 square foot Banbury, and like a lot of builders in this area, DeLuca uses Lennox HVAC equipment. This is a 3-ton unit, with the gas furnace and indoor coil located in a large 2nd floor utility room (since the house does not have a basement...