Thursday morning we called up the contractors who had done the AC work on our house. They said they would be happy to come out and take a look at in… on Tuesday. This has always been a problem with them, so we decided that was enough for them.
To the Yellow Pages! We found R.A. Dobson Heating and Air Conditioning. They were able to have someone over to the house later that day. Sure enough, the fan was busted. Replacing the fan and the blades (which the broken motor had caused problems with) and the top of the AC unit (which had a big crack in it) was going to cost over $1000, all that money and we’d still have a 7 year old AC underneath it, which seemed likely to give out in a few years anyway. We decided to go ahead and replace the whole outside unit. While we were doing that, we decided to replace the inside stuff also, just to keep everything in sync age and tech wise. By replacing both, we were able to move to a Puron based AC, which we felt good about also.

They came out this morning to do the install. It took them pretty much all day of course. That includes having to run a new line from the outside to the inside since the new unit required a larger line. That was kind of nice though, since the original line was run very badly and was really in the way where it was. The new one looks much nicer. The new AC looks much nicer also, and as a bonus, is much quieter.

We were very happy with the service they gave us. They gave us a quick turnaround and did an outstanding job on the installation. The house has started to cool back down slowly, we should be much more comfortable tonight than we were last night.

In any case, he cleaned the coil and charged the freon and all seems to be ok now. He said the low freon didn’t have to be a leak, since they systems to lose freon over time and ours is 6 years old.

We did learn a valuable lesson from all this though. We use the AC way too much. We are now making an effort to really think about how much we use it, especially this time of year. We really were just fine most of the time for the past week, even on the 75° days. So less AC for us, at least untill it really starts getting hot outside.

Having the windows open hasn’t been too bad. We’ve always avoided doing it in the past because of Kate’s allergies, but those haven’t been bad this time around, so we might try doing it more this year anyway, with energy prices being what they are.

Today was the last day of his spring break also. He’s been out of school for two weeks now between his sickness and spring break. He seems ready to get back to school and see his friends and do some work. One of the things that his school has taught him is the value of working. He really enjoyed helping with the yard work, partialy because it was work. He even commented on how important doing work is while we were doing it.

Mira also had a good time, but the actual work didn’t hold her interest as long. She ended up playing with bubbles and sidewalk chalk more.

We’re looking forward to a good spring and summer with them.