Preemption Part 3 - the HVAC system

I'm having deja vu again. Remember how I previously described things like the light fixtures and water faucets in the house? If you want to know which light fixture or water faucet was in our house, just walk through the aisles of Home Depot and whichever one was the cheapest - THAT's what was in our house.

Yyyyyyeah, well, the builders didn't just open up their wallets and plunk down any extra cash on the HVAC system either.

Our system is the basic, bare bones, no frills, bottom of the totem pole model. Basically, it was as low as the builders could go and still claim that the house had heating and air conditioning.

It only had a 5 year warranty, and it's about 10 years old, so it's definitely lived a useful life. It started failing on us a couple of months ago (see this previous post for background). We decided back then to hold out and wait for some sort of catastrophic system failure so we could at least TRY to get our useless home warranty to do SOMETHING for us.

Then the phone rang.

The company that came out troubleshoot the system and gave us the estimate for the new system last time called. Business is slow. Would I be interested in 10% off? How about 16 months same-as-cash financing? How about both?

[Rubs chin] Hmmmmm... That doesn't sound too bad.

Now, we have some good history with this company, Aire Serv, in that we know the owner from church and we used this company for our periodic maintenance on our previous house here in Ashburn, too. So it's not like it was just some pushy salesman calling us out of the blue trying to sell us a pink elephant.

I had him come out yesterday after I got off work to walk me through the options and pricing. He talked to me about our current system and how much of an improvement the new system would be.

So we decided what-the-heck, we'll do our part to help the economy and we'll take them up on their offer. We're just going to have the upstairs system replaced now (the one that shows signs of imminent failure), but we will probably have to replace the downstairs system eventually, too.

They're coming Monday to do the installation. I'll let you know how it turns out.