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Official Pit Home Improvement/DIY thread

ImTheCaptain said:
Does anyone have any idea how to figure out a cost/benefit on replacing a furnace with a new one? I have a heat pump, which is 8 yrs old. When we moved in last year, i had the house hooked up to natural gas. The AC bills are not bad but the heating bills are bonkers in the winter.
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This doesn't answer your specific question, but does address the bigger question.

https://www.trane.com/residential/en/resources/heat-pump-vs-furnace-what-heating-system-is-right-for-you/

If you are north of the Mason-Dixon Line, winters are probably cold enough that the heat pump is running in electric furnace backup mode a lot. Hence the high electric bills in winter. Those electric furnaces are about 25% efficient. Heat pumps in heat mode are 100 - 300% efficient. In HVAC speak, the term of art for this is "COP." Most heat pumps have a COP of up to 3 (remove the %). Good gas furnaces are 90-95% efficient.

Here is a kilowatt (electric) to BTU (heat ) calculator.

https://learnmetrics.com/btu-to-kw-air-conditioning-calculator/

A therm of gas is 100,000 BTU.

The details specific to your situation require guesstimating the electricity being converted to heat at 25% efficiency, the cost for that electricity at whatever the price for electricity you are paying. Then figure how much gas you would need to burn for the same amount of heat.

That's your winter cost savings. For summer, need to know the SEER numbers of your current system vs proposed system.

A/C systems are also sold rated in tons. 1 ton means an A/C system can remove 12,000 BTU of heat per hour.

Trivia side note: 1 ton means that it can melt 1 ton of ice in 24 hours. That requires 288,000 BTU.

The big numbers are always the cost and installation of the replacement system. That usually varies somewhat with locality.

If you are in PA as your profile says, an A/C with gas furnace heat or a heat pump with gas furnace backup heat are probably your most cost effective options.

Heat pump with gas backup is the most energy efficient. The heat pump provides heat in its most efficient outside temp range (35 - 65 degrees) working at COP of 1 - 3 (equivalent to 100 -300% efficiency). Once the temp drops below 35, the gas furnace would provide heat.

Cost of electricity, cost of gas and cost of the various systems determine the economics.

Edited to fix technical details of COP vs efficiency. Per Connor el's post below.
 
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OK...former physics major here...

I’m thinking...wait...heat pumps have “efficiency” of > 100 percent?


Google....ahhh...

Apparently the term we’re looking for is “Coefficient of Performance (COP)”.
 
ConnorEl said:
OK...former physics major here...

I’m thinking...wait...heat pumps have “efficiency” of > 100 percent?


Google....ahhh...

Apparently the term we’re looking for is “Coefficient of Performance (COP)”.
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Thank for the corrected detail. The older I get the less I worry about technical jargon. I used efficiency to mean "heat units delivered into the house" divided by "heat units paid for" expressed as a percent.

Obviously, energy isn't free. The heat pump, in heat mode, is extracting heat from the outside air and moving it into the house.
 
Lol

Not a problem.


Studying physics really taught me the importance of attempting linguistic precision. Not that I always get it right, of course.


And...naturally I’ve forgotten most of the physics and math from that time of my life. Just some of the principles seem indelibly seared into my thinking.
 
I hear you. I spent over three decades doing that. Putti g in all the correct technical terms, caveats and uncertainties etc. Then I spent the most recent decade plus being trained and told to simplify what I said or wrote to "make it into a sound bite." And "make it understandable by a person with an eighth grade education."

It is more difficult when trying to do comparisons across systems that do the same thing, in this case supplying heat to a house, yet have different terms to describe performance.

I really should have included the COP term because the HVAC people are going to use it.
 
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What’s the best way to get a stripped screw out? Redoing a dresser and there is one that is impossible to get out.
 
YoungBuck95 said:
What’s the best way to get a stripped screw out? Redoing a dresser and there is one that is impossible to get out.
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Is it out at all?

The guy we bought our house from must have stripped every damn screw when he put up curtain rods. With pliers and a lot of patience I was able to get them out.
 
DeaconCav06 said:
Is it out at all?

The guy we bought our house from must have stripped every damn screw when he put up curtain rods. With pliers and a lot of patience I was able to get them out.
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Yes, about a quarter of the way out. Need to get it all the way out as the new hardware will go in the same place
 
Blue, do you have a feel about material costs? I'm worried they go up again before they go down.
 
Donkey Deac Doug said:
Blue, do you have a feel about material costs? I'm worried they go up again before they go down.
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They may. Depends upon what material you mean. Wood likely to go up for at least 6 months, or until we quit fighting with Canada.
 
in other news, had a tech out to look at my AC/heat pump on friday afternoon. tech said the motor/control board and fan were shot. was too late in the day to get parts so i'm still without AC.

we were planning to replace the heat pump with a gas furnace at some point and it looks like we might be arriving at that point sooner rather than later.
 
Sorry to hear...good luck.


I’ve only watched the ratchet screwdriver one so far...fantastic.
 
Deaconblue said:
Either screw extractor or vice grip locking pliers.
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We had a stripped screw on our ceiling fan and tried the rubber band and the screw extractor: neither worked.

Since the fan was going to be replaced, I drilled through the screw... and caught the fan before it hit the floor.
 
after doing some research and getting the repair estimate, i have an HVAC update/question

current system is a split system. thee air handler is the broken piece. cost to repair it is $1,800. It's 8 years old; HSPF is 9.5.

Thoughts on lifetime expectancy vs replacing it with a high efficiency gas unit
 
DeacOnCapeCod said:
We had a stripped screw on our ceiling fan and tried the rubber band and the screw extractor: neither worked.

Since the fan was going to be replaced, I drilled through the screw... and caught the fan before it hit the floor.
Click to expand...

That is yet another technique. Mostly useful if you don't need to reuse the hole, or you can rethread for a larger screw.
 
here's a gem for ya: Tub in house I bought a couple years back is leaking down into dining room.

But tub does not have trap door of any kind to look under tub, It's all just tiled in as if it was meant to be there forever and never leak.

Do I just bust up the tile and figure out what's leaking?
 
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