That's odd, the new air conditioner is icing up

Our furnace blower fan is failing. Our furnace is 28 years old, and everyone that has looked at it says, "Oh, that's a terrible model. I'm amazed it's working."

So it looks like we are going to spend about $3k-ish to replace it. Wooo. I'm fifty, so if we get the efficient one, it will have paid for itself in about five years. I am just repeating what the repair guy told me.
I realize we could buy a rebuilt blower motor but I think the furnace won't be around much longer, and our basement is always sort of too cold all the time anyway.

On the other hand, in two years there will only be three of us living in this 2,700 square foot house, and in six years it will be just my wife and me, at which point we renti it out and buy a condo or maybe a cabin. [various Empty Nest cliches redacted]

For want of a furnace blower, the war was lost.

Perhaps you could get a small pet and focus your empty nest syndrome onto them?

Edit: I can't help you with the AC. The climate here is too mild to merit installing it. But we are considering upgrading from a monitor heater to forced air heat, possibly with a wood stove for augmentation and mental comfort.

I forgot to mention that the capacitor attached to the fan is bad too. Basically, I have to think about the next ten years of my life when making a decision about this furnace, and I don't like doing this.

Fixing the capacitor is relatively easy, but Mr. AC Internet Expert here ran into a capacitor problem that was not a problem with starting the fan, but starting the compressor. The cap gives a little extra needed juice right when the compressor starts up.

If you're talking about an old AC and that there's icing forming on the pipes, that means that you could be losing coolant (that's bass-ackwards to me, but whatever). And that's a problem you can't fix yourself unless you're knowledgeable in HVAC. If you have a 20-year-old AC, you'll also most likely have to pay big bucks to recharge it. I got to make those decisions last year - in 2015 the AC went belly up and it was $200-$300 just to recharge it, knowing it would all leak out by the next year. Last year we bought a new one, which we didn't want to do but it gets too hot to do without AC.

A newer one will be far more energy efficient as well.

Are we still talking about HVACs? I can't help but feel the euphemism here.

Oh yeah. You'll get euphemismed good and hard if you have to buy a new central AC unit.

$6k

That could be MUCH worse.

We are getting zero percent financing for two years. It is the furnace blower that is affecting the AC.

Ok, so new furnace and fan, two year old air conditioner, super fancy tablet thermostat, and the basement is still six degrees colder than the upstairs. I'll give it a day or two to normalize.

Within the first year after we bought our house, we had to replace the main furnace, the AC unit, and the secondary furnace (don't ask why there's a secondary furnace, long story). Even after all that, the basement is still a good 5-10 degrees colder than the rest of the house. It's nice during the summer, but lame in the winter when I was working from home down there. I suspect it has to do with the way the ducts are set up, and they probably weren't prioritizing the basement being a primary living space. I read somewhere that adding another return down there can help, but there's not an easy way for me to do that without ripping out drywall.

Yeah, it feels ridiculously dumb to put in standalone baseboard heaters when you've just dropped a blackmarket kidney on a new furnace. I think the math behind airflow gets pretty fractal and wonky. Perhaps opening and closing registers upstairs and downstairs will allow us to achieve some sort of tolerable compromise. From the interwebs:

Leave Furnace Fan In “On” Mode. – This will move the air in your house creating a movement that will force cool air up and warm air down. Return air ducts in the lower level will suck in the cooler air and dispatch it to the warmer area of the house. The return air ducts will always be sucking warm air from the upper levels and mixing it with the cooler air in the lower levels.

cranberries wrote: Ok, so new furnace and fan, two year old air conditioner, super fancy tablet thermostat, and the basement is still six degrees colder than the upstairs. I'll give it a day or two to normalize.

I think basements are just supposed to be colder overall. Heat rising and all. I was interested in your result as my basement is significantly colder than my main floor and top level is even warmer but I suspected that physics is working against us.

Blower motors are cheaper than 3k. They're field replaceable and cheap to repair. My blower has gone out twice in 15 years, and each time I go to an electrical supply place to replace it.

Find the part number on the side of the unit and then google it. You'll be able to find a distributor who sells them either locally or online. Takes an hour to install and wire, TOPS.

I just had my AC go out 2 weeks ago, I feel your pain. We got an American Standard, but if my neighbor didn't own the HVAC company (and would never speak to us again if we didn't buy from her) I'd have gotten a Day and Night. Same guts as a Carrier but 1/3 the price.