All About Air Conditioning, Heating and Home Energy

Los Angeles County Edison Customers - get FREE Energy Upgrades!!!

2011-06-28T03:50:00.000-07:00

FREE, FREE, FREE - JUST Announced, Edison Customers in Los Angeles County can receive FREE attic and/or wall insulation upgrades until Labor Day 2011! This is not a gimmick, this is part of the economic stimulus plan. You may also qualify for FREE or Low Cost Air Conditioning and / or Water Heater repairs or upgrades as well. (Including Tank-less Water Heater installations) Receive up to $6000.00 in FREE Grant Money to most home owners or renters who reside in Los Angeles and are Edison Customers. The Program is called Energy Upgrade California. If you (or someone you know) lives in Los Angeles County and are a Edison Customer, CALL US TODAY! This is not a gimmick, a loan, or a sales pitch, This is 100% for real, But only until Labor Day 2011. All Home Comfort, an approved Energy Upgrade California Contractor, is offering this work for FREE, but only until Labor Day. Please Hurry as work is on a first come first served basis and being FREE, installation dates are going fast... Call me, Dave Cash, today for details 800-708-4828

I know the economy is bad... but protect yourself from Alien, Martians now!

2010-10-26T18:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I went on an insulation estimate on a typical home that was typically under insulated. Today I followed up with the customer who gave me every excuse in the world as to "well it costs money" to "will I actually receive a return on my investment", you get the idea. The home needs attic insulation, the walls are not insulated and the raised floor is not insulated. After assuring him that insulation pays for itself FAST, if he can not afford the entire project, do a section at a time. Start with the attic, on his home after federal and utility rebates he was looking at just slightly over $1000.00 then see the difference insulation makes. Now I get the economy is tough and I get that a $1000.00 is real money BUT COME ON!
Are you kidding me? You own a home in Los Angeles that worth at least $450,000 and you cant spend a $1000.00 on it? Are you serious that you don't know if insulation is "worth it." With all the studies and info on the Internet and your not sure? OK, forget the studies and info - try common sense, do you think every utility company in the United States says insulate just for the fun of it? do you think the Federal Government is giving rebates up to $1500.00 because aliens from the planet wastealot are making them? Do you think that every air conditioning / heating manufacture says a home needs to be properly insulated because they have a secret alliance with out of this world beings? Maybe every city in the united states requires insulation on every building by code because its all just a giant conspiracy theory. Maybe all refrigerators are insulated on every panel (top, bottom, sides, doors) because martians make them do it! Maybe all auto manufactures insulate their cars from cold and heat because its a secret weapon against flying saucers. Maybe our potential customer uses a blanket over his body when he sleeps to insulate his body from the cold at night or maybe he does it just to hide from our martian conspirators. When you go camping do you use a sleeping bag to protect yourself from the elements or are you just being safe from 3 eyed monsters from outer space? Well let me tell you insulation works, works well, saves you money all year long and helps reduce our carbon footprint and environment. So stop the excuses and do your self and family a favor, most older homes are vastly under insulated, make your home cozy and your utility costs affordable by adding insulation, and if not by my company at least by some company or even do it your self (with proper knowledge and guidance) and best of all when you do it you may also be protecting yourself from those wacky, 3 eyed, martian, saucer conspirators from planet wastealot!

To Vent or not to Vent! - That's no question...

2010-06-19T10:34:00.000-07:00

Did you know that there are basically 3 different style vent cover grills or registers you can use for home heating and cooling systems? Many homes use stamped style fixed position grills that are originally designed for heating systems but were never intended to be used on modern air conditioning systems! These grills are about 20% more restrictive then hi-flow grills that can be "tuned" for the location of any room that they are installed in. This is a inexpensive first step in improving your air conditioning and reducing your systems cost of operation. This should be a NO BRAINIER for your home. Cheap to purchase, with a very quick pay back.

Think of your car or truck for a moment, Heating is non-directional, heat enters your vehicle from under the dash and the entire car fills with heat. When you use the Air Conditioning, it switches to the vents that are at dash board level and we "tune" those vents so that the cold air is directed towards the occupants of the vehicle. If you "tune" the vents away from the occupants, it takes much longer for the people in the car to get cool. The hot glass, upholstery and vehicle interior absorb the cold air like a dry sponge absorbs water, taking a lot longer for people to feel the cool comfort. Your home is the same way only amplified. If the air coming out your vents is not properly "tuned" you will not feel as comfortable, you will pay more to run your air conditioning, you over work your cooling system and will decrease the life expectancy of your air conditioning system. This fix is so simple that it is often overlooked. Pay back on installing the correct grills can be very quick so it is a fix that litterly pays for itself and then puts money in your pocket.

Duct Cleaning Scams and Ocean Front Airizona Property

2010-06-09T09:51:00.000-07:00

Received my weekly call from "a duct Cleaning Company" offering my to good to be true "2-day only special" on my home phone. So I told them I was interested so I could hear the "deal" So here it is...

Only $15.00 per supply run and it includes free deodorizer and furnace inspection if "I Act Now."

on an average house of 10 supply runs thats only $150.00 A great deal right?

WRONG!

Ask questions to see what you really get...

The return or air intake is additional and the price will be quoted dependent on size starting at $30.00.

Cleaning of the blower compartment (that we at include) is additional as well.

How do they clean the ducts? well the gal explained, they close off all but 1 supply register (vent), they then remove one supply vent and hook up a "Negitive Air Machine" (IE: Vacuum) that creates a powerful "Tornado Like" suction that will suck all the dirt from all the ducts into there machine.

Here is the problem, I asked how many CFM's is their machine? 3000 CFM I was told.

A standard home 5 ton air conditioner blows air at up to 2200 CFM so the Vacuum idea of duct cleaning they use is not much better then just turning on your air conditioner and blowing some dust out the vents! It would be like me placing your home vacuum cleaner in the corner of one room in your home, turning it on in place, never moving it and telling you how I just vacuumed all of your carpet!

YOU JUST GOT SCAMED!!!

Over $200.00 and your no better off then before.

How we clean your ducts?

We remove each grill or register including the return from your system where possible. We use a powerful hepa duct cleaning vacuum attached with a rotory brush to scrube the walls of all your duct work. We have different size brushes for all sizes of duct work. We clean and sanitize each grill before re-installing. We bruch/vacuum clean the blower compartment of your heating/cooling system. We apply a germocidal disinfectent to your duct cleaning sytem and then a deodorizor /sanitizer. We guarnatee our results, You will be 100% satisfied.

By the way, California Law.. You have to have a Contractors License to provide service or cleaning to HVAC ductwork and systems. We are Licensed and Insured. Do you think the company that called was licensed for this type of work?

So if you still think you are getting "The Deal of the Week" from these fraudulent duct cleaning companies, I have some Ocean front property in Arizona I would like to sell you. - Dave - AKA Dr. Way Cool

Free Service Calls, Diagnostic Fees and my Lunch (What! You don't work for Free?)

2009-12-30T11:32:00.000-08:00

I love helping people. And I am thankful for the gifts god has given me and allowing me to help thousands of people over the years with home heating, cooling, and insulation needs.

However I can not understand how any one thinks that any legitimate reliable company is going to send out a trained technician, with a truck load of parts to diagnose their heating or cooling problem for free. All Home Comfort charges a diagnostic fee of $69.00 to cover our technicians wage, fuel, truck insurance, and our person who answered the phone. If you take in consideration the cost of the rent of our shop, Insurance, Phone, water, Electric Lines, Internet connection, Field Radios, Tools, On going training, advertising, Etc. You would find that our actual cost is calculated to be between $250.00 - $650.00 per service visit for us, just to break even. PLUS we waive this fee with any repair, service or Tune -Up we do! Now we clearly state our pricing policies (IN BIG PRINT) on our Internet site. We offer Free Estimates for replacement or new installations as a courtesy to our customers. (Also spelled out on our web site) We also strive to keep our repair prices amongst the GUARANTEED lowest in our industry for the Los Angeles area.

Today on a call when our technician arrives to a customers call for their Heating System not working, the customer states that "no one told him it would cost money for us to come out and do his repair" - Now you got to be kidding me - are these people for real?, Unfortunately I get this type of call every month, about 1-2 times per month. They must be shocked when the doctor wants to charge for a physical, the waitress for their sandwich, etc.

BUYER BEWARE - If you are dumb enough to spend your time searching for someone who will work for free, then you are Dumb enough to deserve what you are going to get, by an unqualified person working on a system in your home, that if the work is not done correctly can injure or even kill you. Now this is not just theory, ask any of our service personnel and they will tell you that at least 50% of our work is repairing mistakes or shoddy work performed by other people/companies. Now I am not saying that if someone charges you for work, that that guarantees that the work will be correct, But if they are doing so poorly in their business that they are willing to spend money and gas and time out of their own pocket to serve you then either you are dealing with a saint, or someone who is usually not very experienced (or licensed or insured etc.) and I don't know of to many living saints! So what happened to our customer today? well after getting on the phone with them to explain what i have just written in this blog, I convinced them to have us evaluate their heating System. It turned out to only need service so we gave them $40% off of our tune up rate and their call today was $99.00 for two hours of on-site work including a safety inspection with our multi thousand dollar inferred camera. (We do not make money at this rate -It is our lost leader item.) we stand proudly behind our spotless service record and Better Business Bureau Complaint free record. Now I understand that we are in a tough economy, but the old adage you cant get something for nothing holds true.

Bottom Line: Do not be penny wise and dollar foolish... If you want quality work, stocked trucks, presentable, courteous and knowledgeable service personnel who receive on going training to keep up with current changes and safety issues in our industry, then you have to understand that it costs money to provide these services and no one is coming out to work for Free.

PS. For those of you calling the Gas Company to have them check your furnace, they do not do repairs, only minimal safety inspections and the wait is usually several days to a couple of weeks for service, mostly to hear the words "You need to call a service company for this, we do not repair furnaces or sell parts." well I am off to lunch now where I plan on telling my waitress after I eat " I had no idea you were charging me for lunch - I could have had Bologna sandwich for free at home!"

Some People Can't handel the truth! The truth about compresor changes

2009-10-21T21:54:00.000-07:00

Today’s, call was from a man who simply could not handle the truth. I get this type of phone call every week. The call started with a man wanting to shop over the phone to get a better price on a compressor change out. (The compressor is the heart of your a/c system, located in the condenser it is the pump that moves the refrigerant through your system, it is like comparing your car engine to your car.) He immediately wanted to give me the model and serial number of the part he needed, (This in it self always amuses me, people must think that I have every part number and serial number memorized!) So as I stopped him from rattling off a series of numbers, I asked him some basic questions first like, how old is your current system? He responded, well it was built in 1988. At that point I told him that that makes his system 21 years old. I advised him that the United States department of energy says (from studies done with your tax dollars) that nation wide the median life of an air conditioner is considered 12 years. In California, due to not having as severe cold, hot or humid weather as other parts of the country, we tend to get a longer average life on our equipment. Replacing a compressor on a system that is all ready well into the replacement window is not a good idea for several reasons. Those reasons are... New compressors come with a factory part warranty of 1 year. (A replacement system can have compressor warranties up to lifetime and labor warranties up to 20 years!) After you invested a large sum of money on what is one of the most costly repairs you can do, you still have a 21 year old system with all the other parts being 21 years old. (You’re going to have more breakdowns.) Now your costly investment on that 21 year old system is still running at the energy efficiency rating of 21 years ago or in other words a new system will use half the electricity of that older system, so your energy savings will help pay for the new system, but you have no energy savings when changing just the compressor. If that is not enough for you then try this, the federal government is phasing out all equipment that runs on Freon R-22, the type of Freon that is in most residential systems including our low cost shoppers system. After Jan. 1, 2010 no new equipment with R-22 is allowed to be manufactured. This will and is increasing the cost of all parts for R-22 systems, as no new systems are built. This is also raising the replacement cost of Freon (R-22) so future repairs are going to be way more costly on older systems. Therefore replacing a compressor on a system this old is really throwing your money away. An other fact is that compressor replacements do not last nearly as long as factory installed compressors, making most compressor replacements a very costly temporary fix. Last when you replace a compressor it is extremely important to find out why the compressor failed? Compressors can fail in a multitude of ways, mechanical failure or electrical failure. In many cases when a compressor fails from an electrical failure it can cause what is called a "Burn Out" This is where the electrical windings of the compressor motor have burned through a very thin protective film that the thin copper windings have protecting them. This will create an acid in the refrigerant circuit. When changing the compressor you have to neutralize the acid by removing all the existing Freon, adding acid neutralizers to the system and installing Filter Dryers (Filters that catch particles and moisture) or your new compressor will be needing a replacement in as soon as a year (or just past the manufactures warranty period.) No matter what the reason for the failure, you have to make sure that the refrigerant in the system is clean, pure and dry. That filter dryers are installed whenever you enter a refrigerant circuit, that the system is purged with dry nitrogen as it is installed and that the system is evacuated to a 500 micron vacuum before recharging the system. These are all steps required by every compressor manufacture but only done by honest and ethical companies and technicians or in other words probably less then 50% of the time. So if you are getting a cheap price on your compressor change and looking for an even cheaper price (over the phone), you are going to get what you pay for, or in other words you are going to get SCREWED! Now I gave this advise to our "shopper" over the phone and for FREE and I told him that if he still thought that changing the compressor was in his best interest, I would be glad to do it for him and I promise to do it right, so at least he has some chance of not throwing his money away and I gave him my price range for this type of work (that I hate to do sight unseen over the phone). My reward for my knowledge and honesty? He hung up on me! So I called him back and told him the fact that he had hung up on me indicated to me that nothing I said mattered and that the price I quoted over the phone must have been obviously higher then what other estimate he had. It was by $200.00 and I can almost guarantee you that that price is the difference that the filter dryers, acid neutralizer, virgin refrigerant, Vacuum Pump and hours of extra labor involved to do the correct job by an A+ rated company with seasoned personnel will cost, that he is probably not getting with the other company. So you see some people can't handle the truth!

P.S. I never did get the chance to tell him that about 40% of the compressor failure calls I do go out on, after an other company has deemed the compressor dead, are not compressor failures at all, many are capacitor or electrical failures or compressors that are shut down on a thermal overload safety. All a much less costlier repair then changing a compressor. So spending the $69.00 diagnostic (refundable with any repair) that I would charge to come out and find out for sure if he realloy needs A compresor, would have really sent him over the edge! Some people can not handle the truth!

Gas Air Conditioning or Solar?

2009-10-20T12:36:00.000-07:00

Today I had a call asking if we install Gas Air Conditioning systems and how much to convert a customers eight year old A/C system to a natural gas system.

I told the prospective customer that if any systems are currently available I would not recommend doing them, the customer asked of course, why?

Well Several reasons, first the cost of the conversion, (entails installing an entire new system) is not cost effective. It is a much costlier installation then simply changing equipment as you have to add a natural gas line, and water exchange lines to a water source evaporator coil. Etc.

Second, who is going to repair the thing when it breaks? These are rare animals so your average A/C service company has no idea on how to work on the thing. This leaves you stuck with the company that installed it to repair it. Now that's ok until you decide you don't like that company (or its prices) or worse yet, they decide they no longer service these units or go out of business.

Third, I dare you to find someone who had a Gas Air conditioner on there home (they were available in the 60's) that thought that they actually worked well!

So why do you want a "gas Air Conditioner" I asked the prospective customer? (All ready knowing the answer he was going to give.) I want to lower my cooling bill, he replied.

I asked how old his current Heat & A/C system is, he replied 8 years old.

Well at 8 years, a well maintained properly sized and installed system (and I do not know if it was) can be replaced with a more efficient system, but I would assume that the eight year old system is probably not terribly inefficient with a SEER rating of between 10-12 (as compared to 15+ year old systems of less then 10 SEER). I do not believe that the return on investment would be worth while of replacing that 8 year old system.

So what is my thought on getting the Cooling Bill lower? First the simplest and over looked thing... Keep your system MAINTAINED PROPERLY and MAKE SURE YOU HAVE PROPER HOME INSULATION!

Next I suggest a FREE ESTIMATE from All Home Comfort 800-708-4828, for adding a Solar Power System to your home. Take the money that he was willing to invest into the Gas System and use it towards Solar Power. Now your 8 year old A/C system can run for nearly free (not to mention your lights, computer, refrigerator, micro wave Etc. Best yet with current California energy incentives and The Federal economic stimulus plan approximately 50% of the cost of the system can be picked up. If you are interested on owing your Electricity instead of renting it, call me at 800-708-4828.

Welcome to My World....

2009-10-13T10:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome to my new blog. I hope that you will find information that will inform, educate and sometimes entertain. If you have any questions, ideas or comments, regarding Air Conditioning, Heating, or Home Comfort, then you are in the correct place. Feel free to call me at (Dr. way-cool) 888-379-2926 Thanks for viewing... Dr. Way Cool (Dave) All Home Comfort