On Thursday, June 19, 2014 6:30:59 PM UTC-4, trader_4 wrote:
On Thursday, June 19, 2014 2:22:15 PM UTC-4, Moe DeLoughan wrote:

On 6/18/2014 11:00 AM, rangerssuck wrote:



My house is about 90 years old, a ~1500 sq foot three bedroom



colonial. I'm in Northern NJ, and it's getting pretty hot outside.



I currently have not enough window units to keep the whole house



cool, and I'm thinking it's time to do something.







I've had three AC people in to make their sales pitch. what they



have offered (and all of the pretty similar in price is:











Did any/all of them run a Manual J calc in order to properly size the



unit to your needs? Without that, all they're doing is guessing - and



guessing can cost you money, since when they guesstimate they tend to



oversize to play it safe.



If none of them ran a Manual J, go out and get some more bids, and



when the salespeople show up, tell them you want to watch them perform



the Manual J calc.









I live in NJ and I had 5 companies come out to quote on my system.

They ranged from one from HD, a local small company that has been around

for 40 years, to a larger regional company with the fancy new trucks.

Not one of them did the calculation and I can understand why. If it was

your business would you spend the time to do a full Manual J, which

is very involved and will take a lot of time, knowing

that with most customers you don't wind up winning the deal? I'm

not saying that isn't the best way to determine the right solution,

only that I don't see how it could work with todays costs of doing

business. In my case, I didn't care because I had the performance

of the existing eqpt to go by, which IMO is better than a paper calculation.



It seems reasonable to me to quote it with a couple levels of

eqpt and then do the manual J when the customer is actually ready

to do the deal. The cost diff in the eqpt isn't that much anyway.

That's how I would do it and it's kind of how at least some of the

companies did it. They never did bring up a Manual J though.

Agreed, especially since one of the companies has done three houses on my block (similare age and construction), and the other (which suggested almost exactly the same capacities) has been in business almost 50 years about two miles from me and has doubtless done many, many houses similar to mine. This stuff doesn't come in THAT many different sizes, does it?