PennSilverTaco's HVAC BS MegaThread!

5 nominal tons (60,000 BTUs) and manufactured in June 1999; I was told by the guy I bought it from that it was still working when removed, but they just chose to upgrade to a more efficient unit…

 

Now you have to load it back up and take it back to the car wash.
That looks pretty nasty inside.

 

Nah, I think the garden hose will suffice, and if it doesn't then I will load it back up and take it to the car wash that's like a mile from Amanda's house. It is much lighter without all of the guts...

 

Or use a cheap pressure washer, I have an electric one and it does everything I need

 

@Lt. Dangle



Looks to be a roughly 25-year old builder grade York; it still amazes me what people think they can get for 1990s central A/C unit just because it’s R-22 and it works…

 

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We found some of Emily’s stuff (family pictures, a horse painting, and a teddy bear in a Philly Eagles shirt, specifically) in the storage unit yesterday. We did the right thing and returned them to her. Emily has since moved into a condo (paid for in cash by her dad), and the condo has a heat pump. The place was built in 1984, the HVAC was replaced more than 20 years ago, and Emily’s dad bought it in March 2024. After extensive renovations, Emily moved into the place in the late spring/early summer. The HVAC system consists of this Maratherm (ICP) heat pump of an unknown year and nominal tonnage (data sheet was long gone) and a Bryant air handler; Zillow lists the 2-bedroom/1-bathroom condo as 950 square feet, so this is probably a 1.5-ton or 2-ton.

Emily didn’t know where the outdoor unit was, so I walked around the entire perimeter of the building until I found a late 1990s-early 2000s Bryant heat pump near Emily’s condo; I called Amanda on the phone and asked her to switch the thermostat from “Emergency Heat” to just plain “Heat” (more on why Emily had the heat cranked later). Expecting the Bryant to come on, I was shocked when a unit several steps to my left came on. It ended up being this one; I had Amanda immediately switch the thermostat off to see what this unit did, and it shut off. It is also located directly outside Emily’s guestroom window, so that’s another pretty good clue. The unit was running in HEAT mode when I took this first pic…



PLEASE KEEP READING!

 

Emily complained that she had no been feeling well and had even thrown up. She had the heat set to 80°F, and thankfully in aux heat mode so she didn’t damage the compressor (it was in the 70s yesterday and low 60s last night). As soon as we walked into the condo, we noticed a terrible smell. The smell was at its worst in the kitchen, and got worse and worse as we approached the fridge.

Amanda did some infestation and found so much expired food that I lost count. Some had mold on it…



The freezer was overfilled and had not been able to close properly. This resulted in the door not sealing properly, which in turn caused ice crystals to form on the inside of the freezer and all of its contents. No doubt that some food got freezer burn and also got too warm, so heaven only knows what has spoiled in there.

Amanda helped Emily dispose of the expired shit, and investigated the HVAC system (see below)…

 

@Lt. Dangle

This is a 40-year building that was not built to the highest standards, and while this is far from being one of the worst residential installs that I’ve seen, it is far from being the best. Space is at a premium with less than a thousand square feet to work with, and the air handler was crammed into a closet with the water heater and combo washer/dryer. The small electric water heater is located directly below the air handler, and the washer dryer is just out of sight to the left.

So, the air handler is perched on a shelf, and the lone return vent goes directly to open space. The water heater is located in the space where a return duct should be. Since Emily was cranking the heat, I checked the filter. The filter was dusty, but not particularly gross. The log states that the system was last serviced in January 2024, and I presume that included a filter replacement; I got the filter dimensions and wrote them down, and Emily immediately ordered some new filters on Amazon. I determined that the filter, nor the HVAC system, were directly responsible for making Emily sick.

My theory, however, is that cranking the heat allowed the mold spores to flourish and the ducts circulated them through the house. This likely made Emily sick and gave her dog diarrhea. In addition to throwing all the expired food out, I opened windows in the living room and Emily’s bedroom, and ran the A/C for a little while to cool the place down. It was in the low 60s, which is approaching the manufacturer-recommended danger zone of 64°F that I once read in a owner’s manual but far above the minimum temperature for running a central A/C without a low-ambient kit.

I told Emily to pile on the blankets, and buy a space heater if she had to have heat, because cranking the heat until the condo is cleaned will continue to cause her health issues. I recommended that have the HVAC system tuned up and, more importantly, have the ducts professionally cleaned.

 

@Lt. Dangle

The air handler appears to have been manufactured in the 50th week of 2002, which would have been in December…

 

I wrote down the filter dimensions on a piece of mail and put it above the thermostat…

 

@Lt. Dangle

So, the building was built in 1984, and during my walk around I shocked to see a Carrier Round One heat pump. This unit appeared to be from roughly 1984-1985 and is likely original! The heating performance of any heat pump manufactured more than two decades ago (as of this post) is atrocious, and the Carrier that I saw probably had an HSPF of 5 to 5.5 HSPF. I believe the government-mandated minimum is 7.7 HSPF, and my friend’s 2010 Bryant Evolution 5-ton heat pump is 16 SEER with an HSPF of 9 or 9.5, just to give you an idea. Every other condo in the building had heat pumps ranging in age from the 1990s to less than ten years ago, including a newish Trane. There was a roughly 1994-2005 Carrier TECH2000 directly next to Emily’s unit (part of it can seen in the first photo). I have no idea why this place ended up with a Bryant air handler and a Maratherm heat pump, but I believe that heat pump is a couple years newer than the air handler. This was years before R410a was prevalent, so my guess would be that the original air handler developed a leak and was replaced with the Bryant, while the Carrier Round one was fine and thus left in place. The Carrier then either developed a leak or died completely a couple years later, and was replaced with the Maratherm seen below…

 

@Lt. Dangle

Emily’s thermostat is a rectangular-shaped Honeywell “Heat Pump Thermostat” (that’s seriously what it says on it), but I forgot to take a picture…



I believe that the thermostat is original to the condo. The previous owner seems to have kept up very well with annual maintenance in the system, and there are maintenance logs affixed to the air handler dating back about two decades. The system functions just fine form what I can tell, but if this were my place, I would do some extensive improvements when it came to replace it…

 

@Lt. Dangle

One of the condos with a newer heat pump had it mounted on risers, but most of the condos (including Emily’s) had the units mounted directly in the dirt. There may be pads buried under there somewhere, but if there are, they’re really buried! This is bad for the unit in the summer because any kind of foreign debris in the condenser coil diminishes cooling performance and shortens the service life of the unit. During the winter in this area, even if the heat pump is properly mounted on a pad that keeps in level and out of the dirt, snow piling up will reduce the heating performance of the unit when it is running in heat mode. Older heat pumps already suck enough in Pennsylvania without snow blocking the coils!

 

These pictures that I found on the internet accurately depict how a heat pump (and sometimes a straight-cool A/C unit in certain environments) should be installed in the Mid-Atlantic/Northeast!

 

6" snow legs is code here. Those buried Heat Pumps start defrosting and refreezing in the middle of winter are going to get loud!

 

I usually change my filter at 90 day intervals.

 

Also, correct if I’m wrong, but Carrier tried to replicate the GE/Trane aluminum spine fin coils. On straight-cool units it’s not an issue, but apparently the spine coils in heat pumps were not that efficient during defrost cycles because ice would build up between the coils; I have no idea how true this is, but Carrier Round One heat pumps seems to enjoy a remarkable survival rate around here!

 

I made excellent progress with the garden hose, but I’m going to have to use a pressure washer to really deep clean this thing…