It is day three of the air conditioning saga, and boy, if I learned a lot. And the good news is, is that the brand spanking new system is in, installed, turned on, and the house is getting cooler, and I'm going to sleep tonight. Welcome. Welcome to this edition of the Daily Grateful with Michael Gross.
Guess what I'm grateful for? I'm grateful for the education I got when learning about all of this air conditioning stuff. Really grateful, as a matter of fact, because I didn't know. The last time I bought a new air conditioning system was at the other house, and I wanted the top of the line system, and I had seen a train was considered top of the line.
Everybody said, train, just really good product. So I had a company come out and measure, and I wanted new ductwork over there. It was a bigger house, much twice the size of this house, more than twice the size of this house. And I wanted, the ductwork was installed in 1960 in that house, so that house was built in 1960.
And it had the 1960 ductwork. I wanted everything new. I wanted good clean air quality. So that was important to me.
That was important. So I had a train system put in and it was called train air effects. I was so grateful. Our electric bill.
Now I don't remember numbers, but I will tell you that our electric bill on that house, which was about a 2800 square foot house, dropped dramatically. I mean, almost in half, if not in half, maybe even a little better. I don't remember. It was a long time ago.
But you know, the quality of the air was just, you know, it was just marvelous. And I loved it. So fast forward to me, 18 years ago, leaving that house to the former Mrs. Gross, where she still lives with her new husband and moving into this house, which had at the time a new train air conditioner that the lady who built the house had put in the year before is about a year and a half before she had put in with all new ductwork.
Oh, I said, that's happy. I like that. That makes me smile. And you know, it worked fine.
Around 20 years of existence, I started, well, I started having problems with it. I had to replace capacitors and I had to replace, you know, not long ago, I had to replace the fan on the outside unit, now 650 bucks. So then it just died. The other day, it just up and died.
And I had two experts come out and look at it and they both said the same thing. They said, it's dead, Jim. You need to replace it. Well, that's when I got edgimicated, edgimicated.
And I found out that, you know, my train had a coolant in it that they don't make anymore. It was a very efficient coolant, but they don't make it anymore. And I found out that there were two companies that had really good coolant things. And that was the new train train now, has a new, you know, different, very efficient coolant system.
That's the gas and carrier. So between those two. So I said, okay, let's go. But I don't have, you know, the money, I mean, I spent a ton of money 20 years ago putting that system in with all new ductwork.
But to replace the, you know, the air handler and the compressor outside, this is what I was going to need to do here and what was the price going to be. Well, then I started doing more research. I went to the University of YouTube and I went to, not only that, I went to the University of chat GPT 4.0 and trust me, you can get a lot of information on it, which made me very grateful. And then I knew what I wanted.
I wanted my, I wanted an air conditioner made by a company called ICP. ICP is a division of carrier, not really a division, more like a cousin, but their models are the same model numbers. And I saw a YouTube video where my unit was on there right next to a carrier with the same model number. And I thought the guy that was reviewing it, these were air conditioning people said everything's exactly the same, same with the air handler.
And the ICP model was cheaper. So then, you know, I then called a real estate investor friend of mine who knows his stuff very, very, very well. And he said, I've had this guy put 30 or so units in for me, call him, tell him, he goes, I'm going to call him first, and I'm going to tell him, you're going to be calling him. He's going to give you a good price.
And I'm not going to mention the price, but I will tell you, I have to do math here and I'm terrible doing math in my, I'm going to, here it is. The price, as it turns out, was about $2,900 less putting in this system with this guy than the cheapest price I found for the same model carrier with other contractors. So sure enough, they dropped it off yesterday and put it in my garage and because they were missing one important part, I don't know what it was, but at 630 this morning, they showed up and they hauled the other air handler out, all the other compressor out, reinstalled everything, put in a new thermostat and now they said, they left here, I would say an hour ago and they said, you know, we had all the windows open and it's been raining and the humidity has been incredibly strange. And they said, it's going to take three hours to get house cool.
Well, it was 90 degrees on the thermostat when he walked out the door, but I stuck my hand up to the vent and cool air is coming out, you know, and you got to think about this brand new unit, brand new coils, brand new everything, brand new air, everything is new. So when I just walked in here to do the podcast, it was down to 79. So that's better. And it just feels cooler.
I'm not sweating. Last night when I came in here, I couldn't breathe. I just could not breathe. But now I'm breathing fine.
It's great. Life is good. So I'm grateful for that. I'm grateful for the concept of being able to do research and get these things done.
I'm grateful for all of that. So that's what you need to think about doing. Look over whatever challenge you have. All right.
The other interesting thing is they put a foot through the ceiling in my garage and they messed up the wiring on my garage door opener. They fixed the garage door opener before they left. I have a guy. You know, everybody's got a guy or a girl who does handiwork.
Mine is one was Johnny named after the Marie Sendek book. He's going to come over, fix the drywall on the ceiling. Life will be in the garage where nobody sees it anyway, but I'm going to have him fix that. It will be beautiful.
And I'll be happy to see those nice young men and their clean white coats. And this, well, this is a daily grateful.