The 11-year-old high-end Carrier system at our old Harvard Square place failed in the hot summer of 2024. It was probably some sort of leak in the outdoor unit, but it was tough to say for sure. In Florida, this would have been repaired for about $6,000 via installation of a new outdoor unit and recharge. In Maskachusetts I got estimates from $24,000 to around $40,000 to replace both air handler and the outdoor unit. (This might have been a $12,000 project in Florida for top-of-the-line variable-speed gear.)
The company that quoted $24,000 was rated 4.9 stars in Google Maps. They’re an authorized Carrier dealer. They said that they needed to do $thousands in additional items in order to satisfy the building inspector. My suggestion that a building permit wasn’t needed because they were just replacing existing equipment was laughed off. They ran new coolant lines and, despite me begging them not to, decided to monkey with the hydroair system that sends hot water up from a basement gas-fired boiler into the attic where the air handler lives. Because the attic is technically unconditioned space, even though it never gets very cold (poor insulation in the old wooden house underneath allows heat to rise), the circulating water must have some antifreeze in it.
When the winter arrived, the hydroair system didn’t work. The only heating was from the heat pump, ruinously expensive at some of the nation’s highest electric rates. The company came back and said that we needed about $10,000 of work. The circulation pump was failed, which is why fluid wasn’t circulating. The boiler was from 2003 and should be trashed. At a minimum, everything attached to the boiler needed to be replaced. I called the plumber who’d installed the boiler. He came by and said “Your HVAC people are idiots. They will the pipes with 100% glycol, which is too viscous for the pump to move. I drained it and refilled it with 50% glycol like it is supposed to be and everything works fine now. Your boiler doesn’t need any service and is working perfectly.” He sent me a $1300 bill (would have been $500 in Florida, but this guy is kind of a genius and Massachusetts is truly a paradise for anyone competent in the trades).
It’s finally time to sell the old unit. The market for short-term rentals in Cambridge never recovered to its 2019 level. I was never going there except to fix stuff. The family wasn’t interested in spending time in Maskachusetts. What did the lawyers working on the closing find? The HVAC company never closed the building permit that they pulled in 2024 and for which they said that thousands of dollars of extra work were required. (Ultimately, it did get closed, but not without multiple follow-up emails and calls from me. The HVAC company called the inspector and he actually did come by within a week, but he marked it as a “rough inspection”. The permit wasn’t closed and the HVAC company never checked to see if it was closed.)
(Note that the cost to heat and cool this 1400 sqft. condo, thanks to high utility rates in Massachusetts and low quality construction, is actually higher than the cost to heat (one week per year!) and cool (to 72 degrees; no Jimmy Carter austerity here) our 5400 sqft. house in Palm Beach County.)
Loosely related… this lamppost sticker from Harvard Square would make a good tagline for an HVAC business:
Also, a friend’s daughter got into a summer math program at Boston University. She is required to live in a BU dorm as part of this program. Faculty, staff, and students at BU are such experts on Climate Change that there are 31 pages of results from Google when searching for this string on the BU site:
How did the climate change experts prepare their own campus for the brutal heatwaves that are now hitting Boston regularly? (example) They failed to install air conditioning in their dorms.