Home comfort
The things worth understanding before you spend money on them.
Four guides, written to be useful whether or not you ever call us — including a calculator that will tell you when a repair is the better buy.
Interactive
Run the numbers yourself
Three inputs. It compares what a repair costs per year of service against what a replacement costs per year of service — which is the comparison that actually matters, and the one the age-times-cost rule of thumb gets wrong.
Years of service the repair buys— the number that decides it
Defaulting to 2 years, based on a 14-year service life for coastal equipment. Condition beats age every time, so override it if you know more than the slider does.
The arithmetic
- Repair
- $900 ÷ 2 yrs
- $450/yr
- Replace
- $9,500 ÷ 15 yrs
- $633/yr
The arithmetic favours repairing.
At $450 a year against $633 a year, the repair is the cheaper way to buy the next stretch of service — provided the rest of the system is in reasonable condition.
This is a rough guide, not a recommendation. It cannot see the condition of your equipment, which refrigerant it uses, or whether the ductwork was ever right — and those routinely change the answer. The point of the tool is to let you check whether the advice you are given makes arithmetic sense.
The reasoning behind it is in Repair or replace: how to actually decide.
Making the call
Includes a calculatorRepair or replace: how to actually decide
The rules of thumb people repeat are mostly wrong. Here is the arithmetic that isn't, plus the two questions that decide it faster than any formula.
Read the guide- Work out whether a repair is worth the money in about two minutes
- Recognise the three situations where replacing is genuinely the cheaper option
- Ask a contractor the two questions that expose a lazy recommendation
System design
Why a bigger system makes a Florida house feel worse
The most expensive mistake in residential HVAC on this coast is buying more capacity than the house needs — and it feels like a comfort problem, not a sizing one.
5 min readAir quality
Indoor air quality, in the order that actually matters
Filtration is the part everyone buys first and the part that fixes the least. Here is the sequence that works, starting with the number you should be measuring.
6 min readMaintenance
What maintenance is actually for
Half of what is sold as a tune-up is cosmetic. The parts that genuinely prevent breakdowns are measurable, and you can ask to see them.
5 min read
Read enough? Let's measure it.
Everything above is general. What your system is doing is specific, and it takes instruments to find out.
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