PennSilverTaco's HVAC BS MegaThread!

4-ton Carrier at the Gwynedd, which despite being a full nominal-ton smaller than the 5-ton at the Casey, is physically larger...

 

@6 gearT444E
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@wilcam47

I would first like to say that in my opinion, Toll Brothers builds a better house than NV Homes (I live in one) and Pulte.

Hell, Toll Brothers builds a great house, and a bare minimum they have better attention to detail than their competitors!

As I said before, Toll Brothers has been using Carrier HVAC equipment for probably three decades, as I once went to an open house with my parents at a Toll Brothers home that been built in 1993 and it had both original air-conditioners. Liberty Ridge (Pulte) charges five grand for a zoned HVAC system, whereas Toll Brothers has this standard; I still prefer two separate systems in a house of this large, with a zoning system for the basement to regulate the temperature when nobody is down there.

Doylestown Walk has standard zoned systems, and the saleswoman said that they won't do two separate systems in this community. It was brutally hot when Amanda and I went to Doylestown Walk, and the A/C worked great on both levels, especially for a single system with the indoor unit in the basement! One of the most common issues that I've seen in houses with unzoned single systems is that the airflow is much weaker upstairs than it is downstairs, and since cold air falls, the second floor is noticeably warmer. Since heat rises, 2-story homes with a single furnace in the basement don't seem to have a problem with staying warm in the winter, at least in my experience. This is the builder grade Carrier 90% efficiency gas furnace in the basement of the Vetri Aberdeen model...

 

My parents were not originally going to have their new Toll Brothers townhouse built with dual central A/C systems back in 2007, as every other house they'd owned that had central air only had one system, and it was more less fine. Our house in Northern Virginia, which was built in 1989 and where we lived from 2002 to 2005, had a single Trane A/C system matched with a gas furnace located in the basement. All four upstairs bedrooms, including the master, had ceiling fans. My bedroom was always comfortable no matter what, at least from what I remember. My parents' bedroom, located above the garage, was always really hot in the summer. My parents had to set the A/C below 70 to get their room tolerable on the hottest days, and even then it did not seem like enough. It probably didn't help that the air-conditioner was original to the house and probably not the most efficient thing ever. It worked great, but it was old, and my parents had been tossing around the idea of installing a second system until my dad got transferred back to Pennsylvania in 2005 and they ended up selling it for a hefty profit.

My parents rented a 4-bedroom 2-story house from my dad's Navy buddy from 2005 to 2007, and that house had the shittiest central A/C system of any house we've ever lived in; I'm pretty sure it was the original system, consisting of a straight-cool air-conditioner and an oil-fired forced air furnace. Heating oil was not including in the rent, and two years of living in that house made my dad swear that he would never buy another house with oil heat because it was so damn expensive to fill the tank every year!

So, let's see what was wrong...

• The air-conditioner had a Freon leak and had to be recharged every year because the owner refused to pay for a new system.
• The thermostat sometimes threw off sparks when you changed the temperature.
• The oil furnace failed not once, but twice, in the winter of 2006-2007 and once again our landlord didn't want to drop any money on a new HVAC system because he planned on selling the house in the summer of 2007.
• The air-conditioner worked great when it was charged, but as is the case with most 2-story homes that only have one A/C unit, you had to freeze out the 1st floor to get the 2nd floor comfortable during the summer...

 

@6 gearT444E
@ABA180
@ColoradoTJ
@Just_A_Guy
@RustyGreen
@shakerhood
@steelcity2
@Taco critter
@wilcam47

As I said before, the house next door to our then-new Toll Brothers townhome was the same model as ours but with four bedrooms instead of three. The four-bedroom plan included separate HVAC systems for the 1st and 2nd floors in the extra price, and when I saw the dual air-conditioners at the neighbor's house, I immediately bugged my parents to get a second system. Ours was a 3-bedroom, so it was not set to be equipped with the dual systems. My parents didn't want to spend the extra money at first, but on a warm day in the spring of 2007, they visited the decorate model for some final ideas on what options they wanted. At this point, the ducting for the HVAC system had not been installed in our new house, so they could still choose to go with the dual-zone system. They went upstairs in the model on that warm day, and immediately noticed how much warmer it was on the second floor. They decided to get a second air-conditioner and furnace, asked Toll Brothers if it could be done even though they weren't getting the fourth bedroom, and Toll Brothers said they'd do it for an extra six grand. That $6,000 was worth every penny!

That said, I still don't fully trust a single unit with zoning dampers, because what if one of them fails and you're stuck with either no air coming into one part of the house or too much air going into an unoccupied part of the house? With two separate systems, there was nothing in the ductwork to get stuck and prevent airflow. The A/C either worked or didn't, and if it wasn't a problem that I could fix, my parents called an HVAC tech. In nearly 9 years of living in that house we only had one unscheduled service call, when a capacitor in the upstairs unit failed in August 2014. I drove by our old house last month, and the A/C units are visible from the street; I can confirm that both builder-grade 13 SEER Carrier A/C units from 2007 are still there nearly 16 years after the house was built! I would imagine that at least sometimes, if a zoning damper fails, it is not not always easy to access and sometimes results in breaking through drywall.

Also, my parents' current house would absolutely suck if it had one system. It has a 2.5-ton Goodman central A/C with a 92% Goodman gas furnace located in the basement (this does the 1st floor and basement), and a 2-ton Goodman with a 92% furnace up in the attic. My room has an airflow issue, and before I acquired a portable A/C unit from my friend when he moved to Florida in 2021, the upstairs thermostat had to be set to 67 degrees for my room to be comfortable!

 

The two decorated models in Doylestown Walk both have 4-ton Carrier "Sentry" 13 SEER units, and all of the models in Regency at Waterside have Carrier Sentry units as well...

 

@6 gearT444E
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@wilcam47

Please give me your opinion on overall quality of HVAC brands...

Willis Haviland Carrier is considered to be the father of modern air-conditioning, and a result the company baring his name is probably the best-known in the HVAC industry; Carrier is almost certainly the first name that comes to mind when the average individual thinks of an air-conditioner.

One of many reasons I think that Toll Brothers is superior to NV Homes is because Toll uses Carrier products while NV uses Goodman; I talked with some buddies of mine on Facebook who are HVAC enthusiasts like myself (one is a tech down in Georgia), and after showing them pictures of the Carrier Sentry units from Regency at Waterside, one of them immediately wrote them off as builder-grade junk. Yes, they are still better than some other brands, but I'm told that Carrier cut corners in every way possible so they could charge a premium price for the Carrier name. One saving grace is that all Sentry units have the venerable Copeland scroll compressor, but I'm told that they are very cheaply made compared to the old Carrier BASE series units of 10-15 years ago (which my Toll house had). One of my friends told me that with proper maintenance, it would be possible to get 10-12 years out of a Sentry, but any longer than that would be considered a miracle. Even if a Sentry didn't outright die, but rather started suffering age-related issues a decade or so after being put into service, it would most certainly be more cost effective to replace it with a superior unit.

On another note, the Sentry isn't even shown on the Carrier Residential website, and one of my friends tells me that they are generally not sold as replacements for existing older units. Rather, it was designed to be mass-produced for installation in new construction homes. After the Sentry, the next line of air-conditioners and heat pumps available from Carrier is the Comfort Series. The Comfort Series looks similar to base Carrier products, but is more efficient and available with a 2-stage compressor on some models. My grandmother's old house was a large condo built in 1993-1994, and it had a shitty Goodman 10 SEER heat pump from 2004. The Goodman's reciprocating compressor gave out in the summer of 2015, and my grandma put me in charge of selecting a new system; I chose a Carrier Comfort Series with a 2-stage compressor and a variable-speed air handler. There was some sort of screwup during installation that required the system to be recharged at least once, but this was done at no charge to my grandma, and the system was working fine when my grandma sold the house in 2020.

Next up is the Performance Series, which used to look similar to the top-of-the-line Infinity System, but now more closely resembles the Comfort Series. Priced higher that the Comfort Series, units in this lineup are more efficient and offer more features than the Comfort Series...

The Infinity System is the most expensive series, with the highest SEER rating, and an available inverter model. One of my buddies believed that, despite continuing to charge a premium price, Carrier's quality has dropped across the board over the last few years; I would agree, and honestly prefer Trane over all other brands. Our house in Northern Virginia had the original Trane XE 900 from 1989, and that thing just refused to die. It was already 13 years old when my parents bought the house, and in the three years we lived there it never had to be serviced. Aside from the wild temperature swings in the master bedroom during the summer, the Trane performed flawlessly!

Toll Brothers exclusively uses Carrier, NV seems to exclusively use Goodman now, and almost all of the other builders seem to use Lennox. I have only ever seen one brand new neighborhood with Trane equipment in my neighborhood, and that was back in 2010; I have no idea who the builder was.

The base model Lennox Merit Series units are fairly solid, though I would never install one as a replacement because it's not offered in 2-stage/variable speed; I am also not a huge fan of the most expensive Lennox units because they are overly complex, obscenely expensive, and tend to break a lot from what I've been told. My best friend's parents have a house that was built in 1961, which they bought in 1995. It did not have central air, but it had the original gas furnace that installed when the house was built. This furnace shit the bed in 2003 after more than forty years of service, and since the ductwork was already in place, my friend's parents opted to pull the trigger on central air. They opted for a 2.5-ton Dave Lennox Signature Series and 80% Lennox gas furnace. The A/C had R410a refrigerant, which was not common in 2003 (it was made mandatory beginning in 2009 due to the environment concerns of R-22 Freon). This saved my friend's parents a lot of money when the Lennox furnace died in 2015-2016, as the air-conditioner was still in perfect operation condition and did not have to be replaced. The Lennox furnace and indoor coil were replaced with brand new Carrier products; I'm told it is generally ill-advised to mix and match different brands of HVAC equipment, but it works fine!

 

No idea what brands are better than others.

But my new unit is a Rheem. Been great so far.

Oh, I might not have mentioned to you. My AC died about a month ago. Landlords opted to replace the whole unit.

 

Rheem and Ruud are the same thing. These units prior to 2005 were great, but quality dropped off a little bit after 2004; I've heard good things about the newest Rheem and Ruud products, but Trane is still my favorite. Goodman and Amana are also both the same thing and have improved greatly. The shittiest air-conditioners in my opinion are made by NORTEK (Previously NORDYNE) under numerous different names (AirTemp, Broan, Frigidaire, Gibson, Intertherm, Maytag, and Miller)' @Gwyns04 had a Gibson 2.5-ton unit installed in her house in 2005 and it is still going strong, but it's one of the moderately better units that has a scroll compressor, and I expect it to need replacement in the next year or two...

 

I miss my old Nordyne 95% efficient heater. But my new Trane (Ameristar) 96% isn't a bad unit. It's hard to stop a trane.

 

When you say heater, do you mean the whole house central heat or the one in the garage? NORDYNE/NORTEK makes Reznor...

 

My house has a central Natural gas furnace, that's what I'm talking about. The heater in the garage is an electric unit I installed myself... not quite so fancy.

 

Not really. Just ask Mr Beast

 

The unit that the Rheem replaced was a Trane? How old was it?

 

Could you add central air easily if you wanted?

 

Yeah I think so, plenty of room for an evaporator coil and easy routing outside the house and to the electrical panel for the condenser. But my house has hardly any circulation upstairs, which is where I sleep. Heat rises so this isn't an issue in the winter... but cold just stays where you put it so the upstairs would hardly cool down.

 

Which is why 2-story homes, especially larger ones, should have two separate systems!

 

That's a common east coast thing, but very uncommon in the PNW, we usually run a single system for hot and cold unless it is a very large home. But my issue is mostly that my upstairs is fed by a single 10" duct cause the house is 113yrs old and didn't really have room for ducting to go upstairs.

 

4-ton Carrier Sentry at the Derby model...

 

The air-conditioner directly behind it belongs to the house next door...