Category: Consumerism

Sub-Zero refrigerator with R600a owner’s review

by philg

Back in October 2022, we ordered a $13,249 Sub-Zero refrigerator to replace a 42-inch-wide KitchenAid from 2003. The KitchenAid was a $500 landlord special wrapped in $3,000 (pre-Biden dollars) of cabinetry. It looked beautiful with panels that match our cabinets. Unfortunately, the fridge was set up with a single compressor and single evaporator. Cold air to the fridge was supplied via a duct/door from the freezer compartment to the fridge compartment. Failed insulation after 20 years between the two compartments resulted in frost building up every 3-4 weeks and causing the freezer to go down to -20F while the fridge went up to +50F or higher. The automatic defrost mechanism wasn’t hitting the location where this frost was building. KitchenAid’s latest and greatest fridges weren’t exactly compatible with our panels and, in any case, were out of stock. Everyone seems to like the local Sub-Zero service organization and friends with Sub-Zs were happy with the product, so decided to go “Full Douche”.

The new fridge showed up in mid-January 2024, 15 months after our order. Partly this was due to underpricing in a world of raging inflation (corrected to some extent; the current price is $14,250, a 7.5 percent increase that in no way suggests that the U.S. is plagued by inflation). Partly this was due to Sub-Zero having introduced a new product line that relies on R600a refrigerant, which is more energy efficient and also enables a more compact cooling system, thus resulting in 0.5 cu. ft. more freezer space.

The aesthetics, such as they are, take some getting used to. It’s a huge wall of stainless steel in what is otherwise a somewhat traditional kitchen. The cream-colored cabinet panels that we had before looked a lot better in my opinion. If you’re starting from scratch and have the option to do matching cabinet panels, I recommend that. Actually, if you’re starting from scratch and have the option to use a non-built-in fridge that can be purchased at any time at Home Depot for $1,000 to $2,500 (a dual evaporator model at the higher end), I recommend that! Despite its hulking size, this 42-inch-wide fridge holds only 24 cu. ft. in the two compartments combined. You can make a freestanding fridge look like a built-in simply by digging out a one-foot space behind the fridge. A 36-inch-wide LG freestanding fridge has 30 cu. ft. of space. It’s 36 inches deep without handles (compare to 26″ for the Sub-Z). It has dual evaporators, all kinds of fancy features including a clear door, and costs $3,200. If it were to die, Home Depot has a whole page of 36-inch wide freestanding fridges, including single-evaporator models (like our old KitchenAid!) starting at just over $1,000.

The first thing that we noticed is the noise. This fridge has, I think, two compressors. Each one is definitely louder than on a standard LG or Whirlpool fridge and the two together make a continuous rumbling that is audible from 15′ away. Everyone who comes to your house will be constantly reminded of what a rich douche you are!

The second thing is that the ice/water dispenser is a design failure compared to what KitchenAid, LG, or anyone else provides. A glass must go twice as deep into the fridge as on the old KitchenAid. If you’re trying to make a powdered drink, for example, it is impossible to stir and fill at the same time (was easy to do with the KitchenAid). More problematic, the water continues to flow for a split second after you take the cup away, thus resulting in a significant spray into the drip tray.

[Update April 10, 2024: After three months of use, we tried for the first time to remove the ice bin to dump ice into a cooler. The bin couldn’t be removed because there was ice stuck in a drop-down door that is part of the ice-making mechanism and maybe a sensor for when the bin is too full. Service was called!]

We haven’t had time to experience whether Sub-Zero’s ethylene gas filter (replace once/year for $65) and other preservation tricks will, in fact, keep produce in good shape for longer. A retailer in Maskachusetts did a test back in 2020 and concluded that “Sub-Zero was the overall winner. It did an excellent job on the grapes and lemon. The cucumber could have been fresher.” The Sub-Zero does have three completely separate sealed drawers in the freezer and four in the fridge, so maybe that helps reduce cross-contamination.

The fridge has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. It was easy to set up the app and the fridge on Wi-Fi. However, the app doesn’t seem to do what you’d want it to do, i.e., warn you that the actual fridge temp is nowhere near the set fridge temp. In fact, the app can’t show the current refrigerator temperatures (displayed on a panel inside the fridge), but only what it is set to do. This was obvious during the startup phase when the fridge was set to 37 and actually at 70.

[Update March 2024: The app alerted us to phantom temperature settings changes, usually by just a degree, even though nobody was in the fridge touching the controls. This resulted in a service visit and then a return service visit with a new control panel.]

The interior lighting is awesome. If you hire a decorator to come in once a week and arrange everything that you bought at Publix, the result will be a tasteful beautifully lit display. (Or cram in 35 cu. ft. of food, half of it expired, and it will look like our fridge.)

Owners seem to like Sub-Zero. Here’s the satisfaction ranking from Consumer Reports:

Maybe the old refrigerant was associated with a quieter compressor because Consumer Reports reviewed an older model and said that it was 5/5 on quietness. On the third hand, our house came with a ghetto $700 Frigidaire R600a-based 11 cu. ft. fridge built in 2018. It is completely silent (lives in a pantry closet, but we’ve never heard it, even when going into the closet to get items). So the latest and greatest Thunberg-approved Earth-saving refrigerant does not necessarily result in noise.

Three guys from the appliance store (Jetson in Stuart, Florida) came to deliver and install the new fridge ($275, including hauling away the aesthetically beloved KitchenAid). Although I usually don’t see color, I noticed that all three were Black. Skilled labor like this in Boston, by contrast, almost always involves a team of white people coming to the house; Blacks in Maskachusetts occupy a parallel society to which whites seldom gain access. It’s about a two-hour process for removal, delivery, and careful installation.

The KitchenAid lasted for 20 years so the good news is that we have to live with the wall-of-stainless look and the noise for only 20-25 years (median age for replacement of a Sub-Zero is about 22 years, supposedly). I’m still trying to figure out who thought stainless was such a great idea! It won’t accept fridge magnets, which is tragic. It isn’t easy to clean. If stainless steel is so beautiful, why not cover a bedroom or living room wall in stainless? (Elon Musk might be on board with this! He is a huge proponent of stainless steel in rockets and in the Cybertruck.) I guess that circles us back to building a nook for a 36-inch-wide fridge. The visual impact of one of those is much smaller both due to the reduced width and the lack of a compressor tower on top.

[Update: After three months, the fridge has required three service visits (see above). It may be that the mass-market companies have better engineering resources for controls and ice makers!]

Related:

  • the LG 42″ fridge that costs 2/3rds as much ($9k): “Stopped working several time and was Compressor was replaced and 4 months later it is not working again.” and “I bought and had this installed 10 weeks ago, but immediately had problems. … Finally, after 8 weeks, the technician identified the problem as a bent water hose inside the door — a result of poor manufacturing/assembly.” (the $55 water filter is weak by Florida standards; good for just 6 months or 200 gallons; Sub-Z’s is 1 year or 300 gallons for $69)
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If you strung your own Christmas lights, you were paid $6,000 after taxes

by philg

Merry Christmas Eve!

If you want to feel better about your economic situation, here is a crew stringing lights at a neighbor’s house:

“Is that the same company that strung lights for the HOA’s clubhouse?” I asked. “They told me that their minimum fee is $5,000.” The owner of the house responded, “We’re paying $6,000.”

So… if you strung your own lights this year, that’s like being paid $6,000 extra, after tax.

Merry Christmas, indeed!

Separately, how tough would it be to build a robot that could climb a tree trunk, secure the end of a light strand at the top, and then come down while wrapping the strand around the trunk? This is a common Christmas light display for cities, hotels, and houses. It is apparently an expensive job and, without a bucket truck, a risky one. Isn’t this ripe for automation and semi-autonomy?

If we can’t have robots to string our lights, how about reengineering the lights themselves so that we can get a higher return on investment from stringing them? Any given light string should have at least 10 different themes (light colors):

  1. Christmas (green and red)
  2. Thanksgiving (orange, red, and yellow?)
  3. Halloween (orange and purple)
  4. (for Californians and Ivy League students) #FreePalestine (white, green, red, black for the Palestine flag and/or spell out “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free”)
  5. (for those practicing Jewcraft) Hanukkah (white and blue)
  6. Ramadan
  7. Eid al-Fitr
  8. Islamic New Year
  9. Holi (every color?)
  10. Chinese New Year (red, yellow, and green)

Loosely Related:

‘Cause I’m a redneck woman
I ain’t no high class broad
I’m just a product of my raising
I say, “hey ya’ll” and “yee-haw”
And I keep my Christmas lights on
On my front porch all year long

(“Redneck Woman”, by Gretchen Wilson and John Rich (not to be confused with abortion care and lockdown advocate Gretchen Whitmer!))

The final look of the professionally-lit house:

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Costco Auto Program: mostly a scam

by philg

Our beloved 2021 Honda Odyssey’s lease expires in January 2024. Due to the mostly peaceful inflation that the government says does not exist, leasing a replacement would cost nearly 2X what we’ve been paying on our lease whose built-in interest rate is close to 0%. I’m trying to decide whether to buy the car from Honda for about $25,000 or trade it in on a new one (where “new” means “identical to the 2021 version”). I requested a quote from the Costco Auto Program, figuring that the result would be a simple fraud-free number. Here’s what came back from the local dealer that is the Costco affiliate:

The dealer adds in about $4,000 in profit via some worthless accessories for $4,225 and then tacks on $999 as a straight-up “dealer fee” in addition to an “agency fee” of $99 (either of these could be $5,000, right?). On the third hand, there is a note about the accessories being discounted by 75 percent and a bizarre calculation that adds up to more than $73,000 (Cybertruck territory!).

What is the value of going through Costco if the result is having to sort through this multi-layered fraud and being delivered a car that has been disfigured by the dealer? It looks as though Costco negotiates a discount off MSRP and then the dealer is free to add back in as much profit as it wants to with accessories and fees. Costco could negotiate a price of $10 for the Odyssey and the dealer would still be able to charge $45,000 or $75,000 or whatever other price it felt like.

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Best Christmas gift ideas?

by philg

What are your best Christmas gift ideas?

If your friend needs to be reminded that Snoopy was gay, how about this rainbow watch from Timex?

Maybe your friend is a university president and wants to know what kinds of plagiarism policies to put in place and whether to organize daily official pro-Palestinian protests. You could give him/her/zir/them a $9,900 gift certificate to this “Harvard Seminar for New Presidents”:

Perhaps your friend is a Democrat and would like a complete collection of videos in which Susanna Gibson stars? “Her Online Sex Life Was Exposed. She Lost Her Election. Now She’s Speaking Out.” (Politico) is curious. The Virginia Democrat was selling access to her streaming videos. Wouldn’t the correct headline be “Her Online Sex Business…”? Amazon was not started as an “online book life”. Carvana is not an “online car life”.

(You don’t want your friend downloading Democrats’ videos via BitTorrent. This can lead to a lawsuit for copyright infringement because, apparently, the BitTorrent system makes it trivial for a publisher to get everyone’s IP addresses.)

What if your friend is a Republican? Make a donation to the Ron DeSantis campaign on his/her/zir/their behalf. (Why the inclusive pronouns? If New Yorkers can chant “Queer, trans, no peace on stolen land!” in a pro-Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) rally then a member of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community can be a Republican.)

We’ve been getting a lot of use out of our discontinued Ninja Foodi FD101 pressure cooker (5 quarts, which seems to be sufficient 95 percent of the time with meals for 4-6 people). The upscale replacement is neater because it has just one lid, but it is also kind of huge: the $350 OL701 (8 quarts; Amazon reviews suggest that the innovative lid may not be easy to clean). The manufacturer’s blurb says “steam and crisp at the same time” so maybe it works like a $8,000 built-in steam oven for roasting chicken. Maybe the best option is the FD302, which holds 6.5 quarts and is still available new but is no longer offered on the Ninja web site (so it is actually discontinued?). That’s a taller version of what we have, I think. These have lots of buttons and modes so it is kind of like programming to use them.

Do you need the expensive/huge OL701? Here are some excerpts from the inspiration guide:

Since Americans get less numerate every year, the chicken recipe doesn’t ask the owner to set a target internal temperature, but rather to tell the machine “I’m cooking chicken.”

We’ve used the FD101 every day or two for more than a year and it hasn’t failed, but maybe it will and then we can justify upgrading to this even-more-complex marvel!

Given how much smarter and cheaper these countertop devices are than built-in appliances, I wonder if kitchen designs should be updated. Instead of a huge amount of space devoted to heavy industrial-size industrial-weight built-in appliances, shelves and systems that can facilitate the storage and use of these inexpensive super-intelligent constantly-improving countertop machines. Perhaps keep one big (steam!) oven for the Thanksgiving turkey and 2 or 3 induction burners, one of them super powerful, for cooking pasta. The rest of the kitchen can be optimized for a countertop smart oven/air fryer, a multi-/pressure-cooker, a countertop grill, a purpose-built 700-degree pizza oven, a waffle iron, etc. Maybe the ovens can go on shelves where the built-in double oven used to be, for example.

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Second write-down for Gillette after the Toxic Masculinity and transgender ads

by philg

Loyal readers may recall A/B tests here in which the Dorco Pace 7 proved slightly superior to anything that Gillette offers. Other brands of razors were found to be grossly inferior. Background:

P&G wrote down the value of their $54 billion Gillette purchase by $8 billion after the Toxic Masculinity and transgender ads. The Wall Street Journal recently reported a $1.3 billion additional charge:

It looks as though Gillette is still stuck on the same 5-blade system that I tested in 2019, though it has been renamed.

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Aftermarket software for dishwashers?

by philg

Some people complain that dishwasher performance has been hobbled by regulations limiting water usage (see a comment on Science says to throw out all of your appliances, for example).

For showerheads, manufacturers deal with the regulations by making normal-flow devices in metal and inserting a plastic flow restrictor that any consumer with a screwdriver can knock out, thus bypassing the regulation and luxuriating in a powerful shower.

With automobiles, people who want to get the last bit of performance install aftermarket software for engine control (example from the UK; example from Norway). I’m wondering why nobody seems to have done with this dishwashers. Everything about the dishwasher is under software control, right? When to fill with fresh water, when to stop filling, when to turn on the circulation pump, when to turn on the drain pump, when to open the detergent compartment, etc.

What would stop a consumer from installing his/her/zir/their own control board that would do the following:

  1. fill the dishwasher with 2X the standard amount of water
  2. run the circulation pump for a while (assume the owner has put some detergent in directly on the inside of the door
  3. pump out the dirty water
  4. fill the dishwasher again with fresh water
  5. pump out the rinse water
  6. fill the dishwasher with 2X the standard amount of water
  7. open the detergent compartment
  8. run the circulation pump for a while
  9. rinse again
  10. …

If the 1980s experience is what is sought, start with a dishwasher that includes a grinding disposer instead of a weak European-style filter (example: GE’s Piranha Hard Food Disposer).

What’s the flaw in the above theory? Are today’s circulation pumps nowhere near as powerful as what the dishwashers of the 1980s had? (I remember putting in pans with stuck-on cheese and they came out of a Whirlpool dishwasher completely clean; the machine was rather noisy, though.) If the pumps are as good as in the old days, it would seem that fresh software could restore function to pre-regulation levels.

Related:

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Single-stage versus variable-speed air conditioning dehumidification performance

by philg

After an exciting summer packed with three blower motor failures in three 6-year-old Trane single-speed air conditioning systems, the transformation of our house into a showcase for variable-speed communicating Trane/American Standard equipment is complete.

For background, see the folllowing:

The most humid part of our house was the upstairs. This contains two big bedrooms served by a 3-ton A/C for a calculated Manual J demand of 2.1 tons. Relative humidity was 58-62 percent with a TEM6 variable-speed air handler and a single-stage condenser.

Step 1 was replacing the condenser with a variable-speed “communicating” condenser that sends digital information back to the air handler over a two-conductor cable. Trane says that this new condenser is a match for the 6-year-old TEM6 so long as an adapter relay panel is installed. What they don’t say is that the result is a brain-dead system in which the air handler always runs at the same blower speed regardless of what the compressor speed is. Compared to the 6-year-old single-stage A/C, there was no reduction in humidity from this arrangement.

Step 2 was replacing the (working perfect with a new blower) TEM6 air handler with a top-of-the-line TAM9 air handler. Humidity immediately plummeted to a reasonable 51 percent on a wet hot Florida day with hours of rain, an 87-degree high, and humidity as high as 95 percent.

What does #Science say about this result? “Dehumidification performance of a variable speed heat pump and a single speed heat pump with and without dehumidification capabilities in a warm and humid climate” (Kone and Fumo 2020; Energy Reports):

the variable speed mode was able to maintain relative humidity between 50% to 52% on summer days. In the single-speed with enhanced dehumidification, a slightly less effective humidity control was achieved on summer days with the mode keeping the relative humidity between 53% to 55%. In the normal cooling mode, which resembles a conventional system, the humidity levels were controlled between 55% to 60%. In the shoulder season, the variable speed and enhanced dehumidification modes maintained the relative humidity between 55% to 58% and 53% to 56% respectively. In the shoulder season, the normal cooling mode kept the indoor relative humidity near or above 60%.

In going from single-stage to variable-speed, #Science found a reduction in humidity from an average of 57.5% to 51% (middle of the ranges given), or 6.5%. My data, consistent from a Govee sensor set and a $300 Airthings monitor, was 8-10% reduction in the relative humidity reading. The ground floor of the house still feels and measures less humid (40-50% depending on the location), but walking upstairs no longer feels like entering a steam room.

It’s tough to find objective data from anywhere else. Carrier is the only company, I think, that offers any numbers:

The Trane stuff has an emergency dehumidification capability in which it will run the heat strips as the same time as the A/C. Carrier also might have something like this (their commercial systems have a “reheat” mode that might do something similar, but using only the coil and not the resistive heat strips).

It is unclear from the Carrier page if they’re talking about using an extreme measure to dehumidify or just running the variable-speed in an optimized manner.

I’m also unclear what they mean by “400 percent more moisture” removed. If a single-stage system is removing 1 gallon of water, the variable-speed system removes 5 gallons when outside temp and thermostat temp are held constant? That doesn’t seem plausible. If it is hot and humid outside, the system has to remove a huge amount of water just to do its basic job (since cooling outside air will almost immediately result in 100% relative humidity and condensation).

If relative humidity is linear in the amount of water vapor, a properly sized single-stage system has already removed more than half the water that was originally present in the air (since cooling resulted in 100% relative humidity and the house ended up at 50% humidity). As great as Carrier may be (they’re headquartered only about two miles from our house here in Palm Beach County!), I don’t see how they can remove 5X the amount of water compared to a system that removes half of the water available.

(Why didn’t we get Carrier? We already had Trane gear and thought that we might be able to preserve at least some of it (we weren’t). Also, the Carrier dealer who came out to quote the project refused to deal with our house because of a splice where the wires exit the house near the condenser, claiming that their communication wouldn’t function properly.)

I can’t figure out why single-stage A/C continues to be the standard here in the U.S. Everyone in Asia has variable-speed equipment (all of the mini splits are variable-speed). Assuming a constant thermostat setting, a single-stage system is the correct size for only one outdoor temperature. Why wouldn’t people be willing to pay a little more for a system that can run at the correct speed for whatever temp Climate Change happens to dish out at any given hour on any given day? Is it that it is impossible to explain to consumers what a dumb idea single-stage A/C is? (Maybe it makes sense in Arizona, though, where there isn’t any humidity to begin with?)

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What does it cost to maintain a house to a like-new standard?

by philg

State Farm says “A rule of thumb is to set aside 1%-4% of your home’s value for a home maintenance fund”. Aside from the fact that this is a huge range, it seems questionable. If a house is brand new, for example, it will be worth more but shouldn’t cost as much to maintain. Does “home’s value” include the land? If we want to use a percentage of “value” should we start with what it would cost to rebuild the house at today’s prices?

Also, I’m not sure that these formulae are valid for keeping a house in like-new condition. People in our part of Florida will either bulldoze a house after 20-30 years or do a major renovation ($100-200/ft), often back to the studs.

State Farm considers costs for the roof, HVAC, water heater, garage door opener, windows, and appliances. But this list isn’t complete and if you had all-new items in all of those categories your house could still be extremely shabby.

Our sojourn thus far in a 20-year-old house has taught me a lot about life limits. I recently learned about the thermal expansion tank attached to the water heater. This prevents excessive pressure from developing in a house’s water lines if the system is sealed off from the municipal water supply via a backflow preventer (see Supreme Court saddens the guys working at our house today). As soon as our backflow preventer was rebuilt, we began to notice that sometimes water pressure was initially high when opening a faucet. Our next-door neighbor is a senior engineer for a Detroit automaker and my go-to source for everything related to the house. He said that he’d had the same problem when his thermal expansion tank had failed internally. We looked at our water heater (installed 2020) and there was no tank at all! (Due to the failed backflow preventer, any excess pressure was previously absorbed by the city water supply.) The plumber who put a tank in said they cost $300 and last 2-5 years (they have a one-year warranty). So that’s an extra $75/year in maintenance reserve, perhaps.

If we consider furniture to be part of the house, and we want a house to look good, we need to budget for replacement of all furniture every 10 years (usually not cost-effective to reupholster). Online estimates of furniture cost are 10-50 percent of the house value. If we take the bottom end of this range for cheap-ish furniture and assume that the furniture costs 10 percent of the house value, that’s 1 percent of the house value every year as a furniture renovation budget.

Backyard pools here in Florida have a life expectancy of about 20 years (leaks can develop; tiles start to come apart). They cost about $25,000 to rehab every 20 years and the pump and heater can die sooner, so that’s probably $1,500 per year amortized.

You’ll want to paint inside and out every 5-10 years if you want the place to look sharp. That won’t be cheap!

People in nicer houses seem to do complete kitchen and bathroom renovations every 15-20 years. Those are $100,000+, so at least $7,000 per year if you want to avoid a period of shabbiness and people walking in saying “this kitchen could use a renovation”. (Of course, hardly any cooking is done in these dream kitchens, but somehow the cabinets and appliances still manage to fall apart over time!)

In order to remain competitive, hotel owners are required to do complete renovations periodically. Every room is rebuilt, refurnished, etc. Every wall is painted and every floor gets a new carpet, tile, or other flooring. If you want to live in a house that isn’t shabby, you need to do the same thing and I suspect that will cost more than 4% of the house value per year. But how much more?

Maybe the people who can figure this out are the ones who do segregation studies for commercial real estate?

Or I wonder if we could take the cost of a complete rebuild of the house and multiply that by 4 percent. Building a mediocre house in South Florida will cost about $1 million (about $350/foot for 2,500′ plus another $100,000 for the pool). The maintenance budget for a 2,500′ house is thus $40,000 per year.

Here’s what I came up with…

CostExpected lifeCost/year
State Farm items
tile roof$60,00030$2,000
hvac$20,00012$1,667
water heater$1,50010$150
windows$60,00020$3,000
furniture$100,00010$10,000
swimming pool rehab$25,00020$1,250
pool filters/heaters$5,00010$500
$150/ft renovation$375,00020$18,750
Annual total$37,317

Note that the $150/ft renovation is intended to include the kitchen, bathrooms, and all appliances. It would also include flooring and paint. The total comes out pretty close to $40,000/year and there is nothing in the budget for mid-cycle painting, unexpected repairs, or unknown unknowns.

In other words, if someone got a 2 percent mortgage a couple of years ago, his/her/zir/their annual maintenance budget could well be larger than the mortgage, an unexpected result for many.

The typical homeowner, of course, won’t do the renovation every 20 years, so he/she/ze/they will spend less and also live in an increasingly decrepit house (or move!).

For calculating inflation, the BLS uses the fictitious “owners’ equivalent rent” (OEI). Home maintenance costs rise with the price of labor, which in turns rises with the cost of health insurance and, thus, at a higher rate than overall CPI. I wonder if inflation is understated partly because it assumes that Americans will live in ever-shabbier houses. The shabbiness wouldn’t be compensated for in OEI because owners aren’t likely to notice how crummy their house has become compared to a new house (boiling frog syndrome, another false premise of Science).

In other words, our houses cost us way more than we think, either explicitly in money if we do keep them up or implicitly in shabbiness if we don’t, and that might lead to inflation being understated (since we would have to spend a lot more to maintain our lifestyle).

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Heroes of Technical Support: American Standard/Trane HVAC

by philg

Loyal readers may recall that I’ve been fighting high humidity in our house for a while (see ChatGPT is almost as bad at home maintenance as I am for a discussion about how window replacement resulted in our A/C being oversized).

I decided to splurge on the top-of-the-line Trane/American Standard TAM9 air handler and a variable-speed condenser for one of the three systems in our house. Once installed, the humidity did go down from about 55-60 percent to 45-50 percent. Mission accomplished, as George W. Bush might say? No. The thermostat raised dire warnings about “Err 166.00”. This is something to do with the Electronic Expansion Valve (EEV) and “superheat”, two terms that I can’t understand. After the error was raised, power consumption for the air handler dropped to about 20 watts, i.e., less than a small window fan. How could this possibly work even if the compressor was running at only 50 percent? That would be 1.5 tons (out of 3) spread into 5 rooms with 20 watts of fan power? After a week in this state, the system failed completely.

The dealer said that he had no idea what was wrong, but was planning to swap components out until the problem went away. “Maybe it is a sensor. Maybe it is the fan motor,” he guessed. Why not call the manufacturer’s tech support line? “They’re useless.”

He was over at the house the other day (Visit #5?) and I had him call tech support on speaker just to humor me. After learning that the 166.00 errors typically happen between 4 and 8 am, American Standard’s tech support expert attributed the problem to the thermostat being set at 72 degrees. “There is no cooling load in the middle of the night and nothing for the system to do, so it shuts the EEV valve to protect the compressor,” he said. What was his recommended fix? “Set the thermostat to 75, which is what air conditioners are designed for.” If this kind of protection was necessary, how had the previous single-stage system managed to survive more than 6 years, at least 1.5 of those years with the thermostat set to 72? “They don’t have as many sensors as the latest equipment.”

(He is correct that the Manual J calculation for sizing air conditioning typically assumes an indoor setting of 75F and an outdoor temp that is supposed to be the 99th percentile of hotness. In Palm Beach County, that’s 91 degrees, though if sizing a variable-speed system maybe it should be bumped to 95 to allow for the possibility that Professor Dr. Greta Thunberg, Ph.D.is a true prophetess.)

In short, what had caused the problem with our $12,000+ air conditioner was that we had tried to use it as an air conditioner and it wasn’t smart enough simply to turn itself off when the room temperature reached the thermostat set temperature.

(Everyone likes Lennox better, but their fancy “communicating” gear requires 4 wires between air handler and condenser and our existing systems had either 3 wires or 2 wires run between indoor and outdoor units. Trane’s communicating gear requires only 2 wires, so we’re stuck with Trane unless we want to start opening up walls and ceilings to run new wires. Florida houses have no basements and no attics, which makes retrofitting problematic, but nobody seems to care because the standard practice is to gut-rehab or bulldoze after 20-30 years (or 6, if you’re an elite New York-based environmentalist and sustainability expert).)

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The accident chain, hurricane-proof garage door edition

by philg

The high price of homeowner’s insurance is one of the rare Florida problems that is not exaggerated by New York-based media (an organized attempt to stem the tax base exodus?). Folks near, but not on, the ocean can expect to pay about 0.7 percent of the structure value (not including the land) annually. Hoping to bring this down to 0.6 percent, and also insulate the recently-air-conditioned garage, I decided to swap out the 20-year-old wind-rated garage door for one that is wind- and impact-rated.

So what if the garage door is damaged in a hurricane? A car parked inside can’t be blown away. The rest of the junk in the garage is probably stuff that you didn’t need anyway. It turns out, however, that if the garage door fails it can open the house up to so much wind pressure that the roof is blown off.

Clopay, the manufacturer of our new 9200 door, configured it for shipment with 10 struts instead of the 5 that actually fit. This was the beginning of what in aviation is called “the accident chain”, a sequence of events that start small and eventually lead to the loss of an airframe. Clopay apparently delivered a kit with both 50 KSI 16-gauge steel struts and also the 80 KSI 15-gauge struts that are required for the W8 wind load that I paid for.

With 10 struts installed instead of 5, the door would weigh a spectacular 703 lbs. So Clopay also included two super heavy springs (the “#7 light blue” ones above). And they included non-standard big drums for the cables.

The high-school graduates (maybe?) who installed the door apparently didn’t get concerned about the extra struts. They put on the 50 KSI weaker struts, as it happens, thus rendering the door a W6 door.

The building inspector said that the result wasn’t right as far as the spring balance was concerned, but that he couldn’t fail the door installation because of that. He didn’t notice that the struts were stamped with “50 KSI” and that this marking didn’t match the “80 KSI” on the engineering drawing filed with the town.

While I was on an aviation hop up to Montreal and back, the installers came out to swap the springs and left without considering it odd that the door was as heavy to lift, once disconnected from the opener, as a 100+ lb. barbell. A properly balanced door can be lifted with a couple of fingers:

I began digging into this and discovered the 50 KSI struts that should have been 80 KSI. The result, of course, was everyone being angry with me. The installers, who’d been out 3 or 4 times total, were upset that I was hassling them and they weren’t at all contrite about having put in struts that didn’t match the engineering drawings, the building permit, or what was required to protect against the next climate-change-driven hurricane. The manufacturer tech support guy was upset because he said it was the installer’s job to calculate and fix everything (does it make sense for the manufacturer to send the installer a bunch of extra parts and the wrong springs and then hope that the installer will be able to do the engineering calculations that the manufacturer couldn’t do correctly?).

Here’s what I learned: if you live in Florida or some other hurricane-prone region, make sure that the struts on the back of the door actually are the right strength! Also, disconnect the door from the opener every now and then and check the balance.

Separately, a shout-out to Chamberlain and the Mexicans who assembled our 1/3 HP opener back in February 2003. This 20-year veteran has thus far survived the abuse of having to lift 5X the weight for which it was designed.

Related:

  • “Buffett’s Florida Bet Bodes Well for Troubled Insurance Market” (Washington Post, July 21, 2023): Last December, Florida’s legislature passed a controversial but necessary set of reforms aimed at shoring up the state’s teetering property insurance market, where a string of insurers had canceled policies and even filed for bankruptcy, leaving homeowners with dwindling options. [note that Governor DeSantis, who is typically blamed for laws passed by the legislature, does not get credit for this insurance “reform”!] … It’s also the top state for property insurance-related lawsuits, which companies contend are frequently frivolous and often fraudulent, pushing the cost of doing business even higher. … In remarks at Berkshire’s 2023 annual meeting, Vice Chairman of Insurance Operations Ajit Jain said the firm had boosted its property-catastrophe exposure by nearly 50% this year, including up to $15 billion now at risk in Florida. … Among other things, the package sought to curb the nuisance litigation by ending the so-called one-way attorney fee statute. Until the change, insurers had to pay prevailing plaintiffs’ attorney fees, an arrangement that the industry says incentivized frivolous lawsuits and helped build a cottage industry around exploitation of the system. In the most egregious cases, contractors would goad homeowners into filing claims under false pretenses, and insurers were often forced to settle to protect against soaring legal fees. Reinsurers in particular are “optimistic that between [higher prices] and the litigation reforms that Florida is becoming more attractive,” Frank Nutter, president of the Reinsurance Association of America, told me by phone on Tuesday.
  • “State Farm doubles down on Florida after Farmers Insurance pulls back” (Deplorable Fox, July 14, 2023): State Farm says it’s sticking with Florida months after ceasing new applications in California … [the company] sees more opportunity [in Florida], thanks to the state’s recent reforms for the industry. … DeSantis press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, said that since that time, the main issue driving up costs for insurers in the state has been excessive litigation. So, in recent years, the state legislature passed a series of reforms signed into law by DeSantis to address the issues. [Fox credits DeSantis while the Washington Post ignores him!] … The company’s statement added, “We are encouraged by the recent insurance reforms and efforts to curb legal system abuse, and we will continue to work constructively with the Florida Legislature and the Office of Insurance Regulation to improve the marketplace on behalf of our Florida customers.”
  • Effect on children’s wealth when parents move to Florida (the main reason to choose a state these days, of course, is whether you agree with the goals of the state/local government (vastly more powerful since 2020), but it still might be interesting to look at the $$. Property tax burden in Florida, as a percentage of value, is similar to in Maskachusetts. Income and estate taxes are 0% in FL compared to top brackets of 9% and 16% in MA. So the person paying more for homeowner’s insurance in FL may find that the tax savings overpower the insurance pain. And, of course, moving into a modern apartment complex dramatically cuts insurance costs, even those paid indirectly via rent. since the typical apartment building is tough for a hurricane to knock over.
  • “Changes in Atlantic major hurricane frequency since the late-19th century” (Nature Magazine 2021, by authors from Princeton and NOAA): “there are no significant increases in either basin-wide HU [hurricane] or MH [major hurricane] frequency, or in the MH/HU ratio for the Atlantic basin between 1878 and 2019”
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