I’m just happy to get back home

That was just far too much air conditioning for me that’s for sure

Okay, so most people tend to do the retirement move the complete opposite of the way I just did it. I went from living in the south where the heat pump is king to moving up north. And the heat pump just isn’t any sort of match for the sort winter we have up here. The house I just bought came with a new gas furnace and it’s the very latest in residential HVAC. I’m so excited to be looking forward to winter again. Most of my friends down south thought I was nuts to be moving up north to retire. Like I said, most folks tend to move south in order to get away from all the cold and the high costs of HVAC heating. But for me, I wanted to be back home. This is where I’m from and I haven’t been able to live here for more than 25 years. Each time I visited, it just made me that much more sad to leave. This time, I’m here for good and it feels like I’m finally home now. Living in the south for my career was okay. There is so much to like about living down there. I enjoyed the culture and the people for sure. But the summers just took the spirit right out of me. The heat pump was running non stop from June through September. And, it was on in some capacity from March through till November. That was just far too much air conditioning for me that’s for sure. I’m loving August for the first time in a long time and knowing that the gas furnace will take care of me this winter is just the way I want it.

new hvac

It’s August but it doesn’t feel like inside the house

Well, at least we’re to the midpoint of heat season.

That’s what I call the summer. For sure, from June through September, it’s all about the heat and humidity. That’s just the way it is. But like I said, it’s the halfway point now and that’s gotta count for something. While August is indeed the hottest month of the summer, at least we’re getting close to not having the air conditioning running all the time. When you live down here, you better have the sort of HVAC equipment that is designed to deal with this sort of weather. We are fortunate to have just the best quality heating and air in our house. Of course, the heating part doesn’t get all that much use. The winters are so mild that the heat pump only comes on for heating maybe a handful of times throughout the winter. And honestly, after the summer is over, we get the best 8 months of weather of anywhere I’ve ever been. But we still have 6 weeks or more before we get to start tapping that sort of weather. However, my house is nicely cooled by the heat pump and it feels so good inside. The heat pump isn’t just cooling the house either. The HVAC cooling process also provides a very important component as well. The heat pump actually balances the humidity inside the home as well. So residential HVAC in the summer is not just making sure there is cooling comfort. The heat pump is also reducing the moisture level which helps mitigate mold & mildew growth and that helps keep us healthy.

Zoned HVAC

Heat pump does the job for me during the winter and the summer

I’m so happy to be out of the cold winter region.

This is something that has just changed my life dramatically.

And for the better I might add. Moving south made it so I wasn’t cooped up inside the house with the gas furnace running all the time. And I’m free of the crippling costs of HVAC heating as well. That so doesn’t hurt my feelings either. Since moving south, I’ve gotten much more active which has resulted in my health improving so much. That’s pretty amazing. Had I known that I would finally be able to stick with exercise and proper diet, I would have done this far earlier. I’m also quite smitten with the HVAC equipment I have. When we bought our home, there were several things that had to be updated. In fact, we were able to negotiate such a better price on our house thanks to being willing to do that ourselves. The seller just couldn’t be bothered. Yet, it worked out in our favor with the fact that we were able to do the upgrades to our standard. And had more money to do it with the savings on the cost of the house. The first thing we did was to address the heating and cooling. And since we now live in the land of the heat pump, we got the best residential HVAC we could. Our heat pump has an incredible SEER rating which makes it one of the most efficient heat pump on the market. I love both the savings and the fact that the heat pump has me covered whether it’s winter or summer.

 

Air conditioner service plan

Didn’t take all that much for me to improve the air quality at home

Each day it seems as though I find yet something else that proves to be, once again, that I really don’t know anything.

Well, that may be overstating it a bit.

But it’s pretty close. It took a pandemic to introduce me to indoor air quality. One would think that I should kind of have a clue about indoor air quality as a grown person. But I didn’t. I thought the air conditioning was good air. And air pollution was for outside right? That is not the case at all. In fact, you can live in a rural area with the cleanest air and still have bad indoor air quality. And while the HVAC equipment does play a part with indoor air quality, air conditioning isn’t cleaning the air. So why is there dust and dirt on the HVAC air filter when I change it each month? That was my main reason for thinking that the HVAC unit was cleaning the air. It wasn’t. The cheap paper air filters I was using were actually there to protect the health of the HVAC unit and not my respiratory health. That was a stunner. Those cheap paper air filter aren’t removing the airborne contaminants that attack our respiratory system. For that, I changed to the HEPA filter. This type of HVAC air filter actually removes more than 99 percent of the airborne contaminants that hurt us and drag down our immune response. I’m just thrilled that all it took was changing an air filter to produce good indoor air quality inside my home.

air duct

Going with the smart thermostat was well….smart

I’ve never been the sort of person who gets all caught up in the latest thing.

It’s not so much that I’m some sort of traditionalist or anything like that.

But especially when it comes to technology, I’m hesitant to jump on the bandwagon right away. So when the HVAC technology evolved to include smart thermostats, I wasn’t so sure that I’d be into it. The main reason for the resistance had to do with evolving nature of technology itself. I just had spent too much money in the past on the latest tech gadget only to have it be worthless in about a year. So I wasn’t exactly eager to repeat that trend when it came to the smart thermostat. My wife, on the other hand, really wanted to upgrade our heating and cooling experience with the smart thermostat. That sort of gave me pause as well. I’d gone to the trouble of learning how to program the digital thermostat. This allowed me to effectively manage the heating and cooling output to hold down costs while keeping the HVAC costs down. So the idea that my wife wanted an upgrade over me sort of made me additionally resistant to the smart thermostat. But one dinner party changed all that. The host actually had a smart thermostat. He showed me how easy it was to use and all the benefits. Yet, when he told me about the savings, that’s all it took. We had the HVAC company install the smart thermostat and the very first month, I saved more than 15 percent and I had to do exactly nothing to enjoy those savings.

 

new hvac equipment

I thought good air conditioning was just part of going to dinner

The pandemic blew up our lives as it did with so many other people.

But it could have been far worse.

There are so many people out there who lost people and are struggling with that new normal. My new normal was much less traumatic. But it still wasn’t so easy. We had to leave the zone controlled HVAC of the office downtown to work from home in our own air conditioning. That was one of the major things that was tough to deal with. I’ve never exactly been the sort to stick to the central air conditioning of my home. I love my home and I’m super thankful to have the quality heating and air that we do. Without the HVAC equipment we have, it would have been a lot tougher to deal with working from home. But another part of the last couple of years is that I just couldn’t leave the air conditioning of my home to go do whatever I wanted to do. And one of those things I loved to do was to go for dinner with my wife. Finally, once we were vaccinated, and the number of the cases dropped, we decided to go to dinner. This turned out to be a bit of a big disappointment and it wasn’t the food or the service. It was the HVAC inside the restaurant believe it or not. The air conditioning was so weak that I was sweating before I even was able to take a bite of the appetizer. It was so bad that we ended up calling it a night at the appetizers.

 

central heating

Ductwork cleaning is now and essential

I don’t really want to be that person.

But I often am, at least inside the quality heating and air of our home.

My husband knew I was a bit of clean freak when he married me so that’s on him. The kids just roll their eyes but they know that putting stuff away and keeping things clean is the way to keep me off their backs. I don’t know if it was the fact that my mom raised us by herself and had to work a lot to do it. So I ended up doing a bunch of cleaning when I was a kid. It’s just almost an extension of my being. But I think it goes even deeper than that. Living and working in a well organized, clean environment is something that resonates with me on like a molecular level. So when I happened to be actually sitting down at the kitchen table enjoying a glass of wine, I was not expecting what happened. I was just sitting there enjoying the quiet since I was the only one home. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a something sort of float down from the the HVAC air duct. I thought I was seeing something at first. But upon inspection it was like this weird dustball thing. I immediately almost freaked out but the HVAC professional on the other end of the line calmed me down. The very next day, our house got ductwork cleaning and ductwork resealing. I can’t believe the difference in the air and the added sense of clean in the house. The ductwork cleaning has now become a thing with me and it will happen on a regular basis.

 

boiler installation

The heat pump does it all for us

I’m really glad to live right where I do. This is actually very close to where I was raised. But when I was a stupid kid, I just had no idea how great this place really was. I was always moaning about how hot it was. For sure, it gets sizzling from June through September and the air conditioning is your best friend. There is simply no denying that. However, once the end of September starts rolling around, the heat ebbs and in its place comes the best weather ever. The fall is perfect. The sun is shining and the temperatures get warm during the day but not at all blazing. By late November, I’m having the HVAC professional come out to do the heating maintenance on the heat pump. Yet the heat pump just doesn’t get a major workout in the winter. That seems about right given how much it runs all summer. Still, the heat pump produces the needed HVAC heating once the cold snaps come. But really, the heat pump can pretty much call it a day with the heating before lunchtime as the temps usually pick up a bit. Yet when late spring hits, there is some need for the central air conditioning to pump out the HVAC cooling. And again, the heat pump has our backs. Still, it’s the summer where the heat pump totally shines. I left this place for a while and it took me about a month to figure out what a mistake that was. But it took me five years to get my way back here. I won’t be leaving the land of the heat pump again.

Cooling install

Sunroom gets some residential HVAC

When we moved down here, my wife was just crazy about being outside.

Since we were no longer dealing with a winter that needs a gas furnace, she wanted to be outside. To that end, she also wanted us to get a place with a sunroom. A sunroom didn’t exactly make all the much sense to me given that we lived in a very sunny region. But I really wanted our retirement transition to be good for both of us. If she was game to buying a house next to our on a golf course, I could sure deal with a sunroom. We moved in the fall and just loved the house from the get go. We had the HVAC equipment replaced when we bought the place but hadn’t been back since the heating and cooling equipment was installed. Of course, the fall weather where we live is glorious. And so the new heat pump just stayed dormant. Finally, in the middle of January, we hit a cold snap and the heat pump came on for the first time. It was more than up to the task. This whole time, my wife was soaking up the sunroom and making really part of our house. But by late spring, I knew that the sunroom was going to need some air conditioning if she was going to use it in the summer. I had the HVAC professionals install a ductless heat pump out there and it blew my mind with just how great it worked. So with the air conditioning from the ductless heat pump, my wife never skipped a beat all summer in her sunroom.

 

heating contractor

Make sure the HVAC unit is part of your chore list

I’m not so great about getting things done around the house.

My wife can attest to that.

Still, it’s not like I’m just a caveman who expects to simply have his wife do everything. But for a long time, I was in a very predictable cycle. I’d go to work and sit at my desk inside the zone controlled HVAC of the office all day. And then, I’d come home just to sit in my recliner enjoying the central air conditioning of home. Sure, I’d get up for dinner or pick up one of the kids. I might even motivate enough to get to the grocery once every couple of months. The rest was on my wife and that wasn’t fair. She worked too and is a wonderful mother. It was clear that I needed to change up my cycle. Getting off my butt was the answer. My wife and I decided to join a gym and meet there right after work. We’d work out for an hour inside the commercial HVAC of the gym before picking up one or both of the kids from wherever. And instead of going right to the recliner in the central air conditioning, I got about doing chores for an hour or so before dinner. I’m even getting the HVAC air filter changed every month and on time. That’s something that should have been getting done all along but it wasn’t. These days, the HVAC unit is happy, my wife is happy and I’m feeling a whole lot better about myself.
Quality heating and cooling