We’ve been in this house for almost 13 years now. We bought it new; in fact, we bought the house before it was built and got to visit it at various stages of construction to follow its progress. It was a patch of dirt when we bought it.
A few years after buying it, my wife really wanted air conditioning and better heating so we got that installed. And then later we paid an HVAC company to do regular maintenance.
Last year there were problems with the AC not putting out cold air. After some troubleshooting we got it to work with a system reset, but we were warned there might be a major issue with it.
They came recently to inspect again and discovered that it was severely damaged. There was leaking of coolant and the equipment was not repairable. Fortunately, it was within the 10 year warranty!
Unfortunately, the company that installed it (a small company) has gone defunct. No more web site and it permanently closed (I suspect around the time of the pandemic). There was nobody to honor our warranty.
So, I had to get it replaced. It’s very expensive. We’re talking 15 year payment plan. Luckily I can afford it and the company doing this installation is large and has been around for many decades. They also got everything done in one day. It just finished today. They did a great job, the system works perfectly and they’ll be able to fully support it.
Still, it sucks to have another monthly payment for a system that would have been fully covered if the old company was still around. At least my oldest daughter is now of age and I’m no longer paying child support, so this is basically taking the place of that.
And we will not have to suffer this year. If we waited a month they’d probably be too busy and we’d be on a long wait list (plus tariff price hikes are incoming soon).
Sorry to hear about your A/C troubles. Meh, it’s only money, and at least you have a good reliable working system now.
I see that we have several things in common, house-wise. Your house is just slightly newer than mine, I think by about three years or so, although I didn’t buy this one new – it was a couple of years old at the time.
The other thing is buying a new house before it’s built, or at least, before it’s completed, and visiting the construction site from time to time. The purchase having been completed, isn’t it great fun to visit the construction site, watching a pile of lumber and bricks turning into a beautiful house, and knowing that “this is mine – all mine!” (well, except for the part belonging to the bank!).
I’ve done this twice. Once, watching the construction begin from scratch with literally a hole in the ground, but that doesn’t really count because we were only there for a very short time due to a job opportunity in another city. The other – a house that I dearly loved – was just in the framing stage when we bought it, and I loved to go in and walk around and imagine what it would look like when completed.
As for A/C, this no-longer-new house still had working A/C last summer and I hope it still does, as this ROF (Retired Old Fart) has no wish to spend vast sums of money on a new one. I’m never sure whether it’s a great idea to cover the outside unit over the winter as I’ve read contradicting opinions. It does help to preserve its appearance but if moisture gets in there a cover may accelerate rather than prevent corrosion. It was left uncovered this winter. We’re probably just a few weeks away from the Big Test of turning it on for the season!
ETA: Love your last couple of monthly rant titles!
Thank you! I wanted to see if I could make two fit together.
The funny thing about the A/C is I can totally live without it. It never gets very hot downstairs and upstairs, if I open windows on opposite sides of the house it makes a wonderful cross-breeze that cools naturally. I thought we got so lucky having a house that stays fairly cool in the summer and warms up easily in the winter.
However, it’s not nearly cool enough for my wife. When I think the temperature is perfect, she’s dying of heat.
The price (which is in the tens of thousands of dollars) is worth it to make my wife happy. That’s sappy but it’s accurate.
Definitely worth it, no question, but the cost seems extraordinary to me.
I’ve alternated between old and new houses and the previous one was post-war era but renovated. It had a water-cooled A/C in the basement that was frequently erratic. But it was fine when it worked. At the time, my son was just an infant and it was nice to be able to fill his inflatable backyard pool with warm water from the A/C output (the previous owners had plumbed a special outdoor tap just to get warm water from the A/C – I think they used it to water the garden).
But the thing was erratic and often failed. I eventually gave up and shopped around for a cheap conventional replacement. I found a place that offered a Carrier of the right capacity at a discount price because it wasn’t as efficient as the new ones. I didn’t care because I didn’t plan on living there much longer, and the installer I chose put in the new A/C and also hauled away the old one for only a couple of thousand. And what a deal that was – the old water-cooled dinosaur in the basement was a PITA to haul away, and the Carrier unit outside was remarkably small in comparison, but worked like a charm.
In my family, this little fact would result in the AC unit getting a silly name and talked about as if it were another child.
I’m a perpetually cold person, I want my house at 22C at all times. My husband is a furnace and wants it colder, like 20C. I live in hoodies and under throw blankets. We have a mini split AC upstairs that is placed to cool down the bedrooms in the summer, it doesn’t really cool down the first floor much at all.
When he’s working from home, my husband is on the first floor. My office is on the second, and I mostly work from home full time, and the AC is about 8 feet from my desk. So I’m generally freezing in my office, that’ll get down to 18C just to get the bedrooms cool enough to sleep.
A few months back I bought a new car to replace my finally way too old car. Bought through a dealership, and as is completely normal, they needed proof of insurance to get the car registered, etc. I call my insurance company and add the car to my policy along with adjusting my existing coverage. They send me the temporary docs, I sign things online or approve over the phone, and we’re off and running. My insurance is setup as autopay, and I can see money comes out of my account every month to pay for it.
Yesterday, I go to make another change, and I don’t see the new car. It’s not there at all. So I call them up, and the guy on the phone says A) he has no record of that car being added and B) they don’t insure this model of car AT ALL.
I’m thinking… excuse me? I’m looking right now at a document with the company’s letterhead, listing my policy number and my new car, Make, Model and VIN. After one more unsuccessful attempt to get the car added, I befuddledly thank him and hang up.
I search through every letter and email I can find from the company and the only mention of the new car is on the document they sent me for “temporary” coverage while it was being added to my policy. No “you need to sign this or pay this to get the new car covered”, no “we don’t cover this car, too bad so sad, find another company to insure it.” Nothing. I’ve been uninsured on that car for weeks. I have no idea if the document they first sent me was even valid to begin with.
Thankfully last night I was able to go online and pickup coverage on all of my cars that is significantly less expensive than what I was paying. Thanks Flo, and the Limu Emu can go fuck himself.
Possibly the area I live in. It’s a full HVAC system for a good-sized house in an area with relatively high housing costs. And this is both heat and cooling with all new equipment.
I’m very sorry to even have to ask… but because of SCUMBAGS of every gender
( there is a very close case which I will not show here), I need to ask: are you Sure that your daughter ever received even one dime of your support?
In one sense you’ve been very lucky. That’s the least-bad way I an imagine to discover that you’re uninsured.
In my state about now you’d be getting a nastygram from the state saying that since you’re uninsured your registration is revoked and it’ll cost $LOTS to get it back. After you show up at DMV in person with insurance you scofflaw you!
2022 Kia Telluride. Apparently they had an issue with spoofed remote starting that made a few years/models easy to steal, but this was corrected in a recall.
Yup! My ex-wife is a really good mom and I get along with her very well (much better than I did when we were married at least). My daughter has had challenges with her mental health and my ex has always put her first.
I was almost upset when the child support payments stopped because I want to make sure my daughter is still doing okay, but she and my ex both know I’m always here to support her for whatever she needs, financially or emotionally or whatever.
Like most non-poor folks I have a brokerage account and an advisor. Had 'em for years. From when my wife died 3-1/2 years ago until now I’ve moved 4 times. All the USPS forwarding orders are long since expired. The advisor and backing brokerage have my new address for everything and have done so for almost a year as of today. I get snail-mail at my current address from them at least monthly.
But … [cue ominous music].
About once every six months the brokerage mails something to my address from back then, 4 address changes ago. Fortunately I’m on good terms with the people who bought my place and they let me know when that happens. It’s only a couple miles away so I can stop by easily to pick up my errant mail. But this is getting old for them too. Real old.
I have repeatedly had my advisor firm lean on their brokerage to purge that old address from every system. The brokerage insists they have done so. And yet it continues.
A couple days ago I got an email to DocuSign something from the brokerage because they’re changing how they’ll handle cash in/out, checkwriting, etc. The pre-filled non-editable form had the old bad address on it.
Yesterday I got a snail mail from the brokerage at my current address. Not forwarded, addressed to here where I really am. Containing a paper copy of the same form pre-filled out with the bad address. Gaaah!!!
To boot, the form has about six options on it where there is no way for the brokerage to know which of several choices any given customer might want for each of the six options.
So of course the DocuSign document pre-selected a bunch of the choices and is non-editable. And of course the paper form also preselected a bunch of choices so I’d need to white-out their mistakes and then check the boxes I want.
As will 100% of their other umpteen thousand (million?) customers. What sort of idiocy exists in the bowels of large financial institutions? Wait, wait, don’t answer that.
You appear to have all your ducks in a row to document this narrative. One piece of relevant advice I’ve read on the Dope is to present the narrative and documentation to the CEO of the brokerage (or at least as close to the C-suite as you can manage).
This thread is for mini-rants, and saying that you don’t get the point of remote starting sounds like it qualifies to me!
Here is a good article talking about at least one handy use for the feature:
Remotely warming a car’s engine in frigid temperatures comes in handy and saves some wear and tear on the engine and transmission. However, the real benefit lies in prewarming the car’s cabin on bitterly cold days and precooling it on hot ones.
That makes sense to me. And I remember back when I had an old 1977 Chevy Impala that took forever to warm up; both the interior of the car and the engine itself. Being able to start a car like that ahead of time from the comfort of my home would have been amazing.
I don’t think “pre-cooling” is as important; if I turn on A/C in my car it takes seconds to cool everything down, but I guess if I lived in a place like Arizona that might not be the case.
As a person who doesn’t have an attached garage, the ability to take the chill off in winter is a nice perk. Starting cars now is a pushbutton affair, so pushing that button from 30 feet away seems reasonable.
In the desert southwest if you park outdoors and don’t precool the car, the AC may not get the steering wheel cool enough to touch without gloves for 20+ minutes. Relative to normal desert southwest summer temps, or Minnesota winter temps, your car’s heater is far more effective against cold than is the AC against hot.
Part of that issue is a sealed up car parked outdoors on a Minnesota winter day can only cool down to the ambient outdoor temp, -10F or whatever. No matter how long it sits there, days even, that’s all the cold it will get. But a sealed up car parked in the sun in an Arizona / Nevada / etc summer can rise to 150-160F or even 180F inside while the ambient air temp outside is a mere 110-115ish. And that interior temp rise only takes an hour or two. Far less than a normal workday, about the duration of a movie matinee or lunch and mall crawl.
Even in the PNW, I always use a steering wheel cover for vehicles I own. Not only are they more comfortable on my hands, but they work wonders on keeping the wheel safe to touch.
It doesn’t need to be very hot outdoors for a dark plastic/rubber steering wheel to get dangerously hot in direct sunlight after it sits for hours. I’ve literally burned my hands in the past. A light-colored memory foam cover is cheap, comfortable, and solves the problem.
