It’s the season when the air conditioner, which gave up the ghost on the last warm day last October, rises up to haunt me and says, “You need to spend large amounts of money to replace me, and the furnace too while you’re at it, since after all we’re both 25 years old.”
The first bid came in at…are you sitting down? I’ll wait.
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The first bid came in at $9,248. (95% efficient furnace, 17 SEER air conditioner.)
I want to do business with this company (I know something about them; I worked for them briefly back in the Bad Ol’ Eighties and I know they do good work) so I called the guy back today and said, dude, this is just too much money. What’s the next tier down?
He said, how much do you want to spend? I said, between 5 and 7 is where my comfort zone is. He said, I’ll call you right back.
And he did. $6,698 for a 95% efficient furnace, and a 13 SEER air conditioner.
I feel better now. The best part of having someone else do the work is that I won’t have to carry my own warranty.
(Of course, all this being said, I’m old enough and been doing this long enough to remember, back in the ’70’s when I was doing estimating, that we could install a Bryant 3-ton split system a/c in most homes for $973, complete. And if you wanted a new Bryant furnace with that, just add another $300. So my comfort zone is only relatively comfortable.)
(I should also note that the EPA has added hundreds of dollars of overhead and direct materials cost because of their idiotic CFC regulations that do absolutely dick-all to solve any ozone hole problem they were created in response to. It costs money to become certified to handle CFCs, you have to have Very Expensive Special Equipment to pump down old refrigerant for recycling, and the new “environment-friendly” refrigerants are just mind-bogglingly expensive and not nearly as efficient. That estimate for $973 we used back in the 1970’s? R22 cost us about a dollar a pound. By way of comparison, I have a brand-new 30 pound cylinder of it in my garage that’s worth $225 (or more) today. And nobody even uses R22 anymore except in servicing old equipment, and all you can get is recycled — it’s not manufactured anymore.)
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Cripes, dude, how big is that house? We put in a new furnace AND air ten years back, total cost $1700. Can’t have gone up THAT much in that time, can it? Damn, I better take better care of my shit.
2000sf.
If I were still contracting, I couldn’t do it myself for less than about $5,000…and that would be with the “You’re my pal so…” discount, and it wouldn’t be with top-grade equipment. The equipment costs alone are staggering.
Oh, and 10 years ago you could still obtain and install R22 equipment. Now it’s all R410A and you get screwed mightily as a result.
FWIW I just ran a CPI calculation to see what $1,273 in 1973 is worth today. I came up with $$6,407.06. So even if you don’t make an allowance for all the bureaucratic EPA bullshit that has accreted since the days when we vented refrigerant directly to atmosphere, that comes out pretty close.
When we owned the apartment complex, I could replace both indoor/outdoor units for $1500 or so. EPA requirements kicked in the year we sold. Cost went up 150% overnight.