New air conditioner or just replace freon?

[Anonymous]

FYI: Even heat pumps need and use some kind of special refrigerant. No new HVAC will be precisely using the trademarked product Freon, as it was banned years ago.

To be honest, I am not sure if any of the previous posters literally meant Freon (tm) or simply meant refrigerant when they wrote Freon. I interpreted the word Freon as meaning “whichever refrigerant that system uses”.

[Anonymous]

Have you priced Freon recently

[Anonymous]

You can google the price of R22 (supposedly “reclaimed” but perhaps grey/black market). It’s quite available. And if you only need a few pounds or less, and this has not been a problem recently, it’s a pretty easy decision to see adding R22 solves the problem. Do you think an average-income family can buy a new A/C system when replacing a little refrigerant will solve the problem? So why should you just because you’re UMC?

[Anonymous]

A new unit split complete shouldn't cost more than 5-6k. The parts are only 2500-3k on hvacdirect

[Anonymous]

Get a second opinion from https://moesmechanical.com/. I’m not affiliated in any way, just a super happy customer. A few weeks ago I had a supposedly reputable company tell me I had to replace my entire system and Moe was able to get the AC back up and running for $300 on the spot. It seems unfortunately that there are many AC companies that at best are incompetent and at worst are crooks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:A new unit split complete shouldn't cost more than 5-6k. The parts are only 2500-3k on hvacdirect

But labor is expensive. We were quote much more than that to replace our unit.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ask your friends, coworkers, neighbors for AC guy recommendation. Most of the AC companies want to get a new system. Easy money to them and less work.

I highly recommend this. We had what we thought was a reputable larger company out for a tune-up recently (Sila). They claimed we had a Freon leak and it wasn’t a type of Freon they serviced. They said we likely need a new system. My normal HVAC guy came over the next day when we texted him (he wasn’t available for the tune up in our time frame). He said we needed no such thing. System is definitely old (15 years) but still hanging in there.

Thank you, I thought the same and refused to pay for whole new system and it works fine now w/ just adding "freon" or whatever.