Reply to HVAC replacement - looking for advice from those who have BTDT

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]  we do them (Manual J) for all our installs because having to rip out and reinstall incorrectly sized equipment is a fools errand.

[/quote]

You want a contractor who says things like this.

First, they're up on the latest science. Second, they intend to stand by their work.

Question for PP: How do you integrate the Manual J into the bid process? Because I'd imagine a proper Manual J takes about $500 worth of labor. Do you bid just the labor of the install and say equipment is contingent on the results of the J? Or do you charge up front for the J?[/quote]

So the overwhelming majority of contractors are going to replace existing equipment with new equipment that's the same size unless a homeowner says the existing system didn't heat or cool the home properly.  Its the easiest thing to do.  We haven't routinely done pen and paper Manual Js for years; we pay a pretty good amount of money for access to a proprietary software program that calculates loads based on a homes location and about a dozen additional variables that we find during the estimate (direction of the house that has the most windows, ceiling heights, insulation, etc) that fine tunes the number.  We've tested the results against a handful of pen and paper results and we found that they are just are accurate.  There's still some nuance in equipment sizing especially in retrofit applications where the existing duct work can be suspect (to put it mildly).  Making wholesale changes to an existing duct system can be incredibly intrusive and cost prohibitive unless people are doing a to the studs style renovation.  Existing gas furnaces are the thing we run across that are routinely oversized, sometimes by multiple sizes up.  The interesting thing about inverter heat pumps is that they don't come in half ton sizes so there's a lot of installs where they are actually oversized by a bit.  They can ramp down enough in a regular ducted system that its not an issue unless they are grossly oversized.  You can run into problems with oversized ductless systems, particularly ones with multiple heads sharing an outdoor unit.                                [/quote]

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