Charlie: Tom is in spring. He says he’s trying to decide between a 14 and a 16 SEER AC unit, Tom, and the difference is about $1000. What’s your thought on the higher SEER? Is it worth it?
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Tom: I like $1000 better than a 16 SEER. Now, a 14 SEER is really efficient, and it’s the starting point now because when I put my air conditioners in back in ’97 the starting point was a 10. And that was actually one of the best units ever made because they were such a workhorse and that’s why mine are still really working well today.
But every couple of years they would raise the standards and 13 a couple of years ago was the starting point. Now it’s pretty much a 14. So anything you buy today and you replace anything that’s ten years old or older is going to be so much more efficient it’s silly to spend that extra money, especially with the low energy prices that we have today.
I just got my electric bill yesterday for this last month and let me tell you I keep my house cold at night, 68 degrees. And it was 150 bucks. So it takes a long time just on the cooling savings which would be just a very small percentage of that to get your money back. Don’t spend it.
Charlie: What about heat pumps, Tom? I mean we converted to a heat pump here at the office.
Tom: Well, it’s if you have natural gas and you have a gas furnace, heat pump is an air conditioning system. An air conditioning system is a heat pump. The only difference with the name is a heat pump has a reversing valve so it can be used as a heater too. But they’re both exactly the same as air conditioners. I just had an old heat pump that I got from a friend of mine, that Rick over at Absolute Comfort Air pulled the heat pump part out of it and he hooked it onto my garage so it’s only working in one direction as a cooling machine, but they’re the same thing. The only time you go with a heat pump is if you have, you don’t have access to natural gas as far as I’m concerned.
Charlie: So you think if you’re in an all electric home, heat pump is the way to go but if you have gas you want to go the traditional furnace then.
Tom: Yes. And the heat pumps when they first came out during the L&P all electric homes, they used to do whole neighborhoods like that. Those were not very good and that’s why if you go back long enough on this show you had a lot of people including me say, don’t do it. But today they’ve got it down. Everybody can work on it. Everybody can fix them. They’re simple now. They aren’t so complicated as they were 25, 30 years ago.