whats the oldest system u ever seen?

[Airmechanical]

a quick poll if you will,
please chime in everybody,
whats the oldest operational
residential system that you have ever seen,
approx. how old and what brand?



.

[coolguysfl]

Typhoon Heat Pump

36,000 BTU

Mounted on a FACTORY plywood base... SEMI Hermetic compressor!. Had serial #'s that indicated 1954. Unit was 1/2 as big as a train car - melted down could have made a 3 Buick's

[BaldLoonie]

Oldest A/C was this old Carrier. Actually took 2 out the same summer. This one worked fine, the other was sitting outside. HO said it would work but had a bad contactor. Semi hermetic, condenser blower, R500 (Carene 7).

http://www.johnmills.net/ht/mer-oldac.jpg

[jksmylieone]

I think I can top that, I've got a couple old Niagra coal conversions in north east ohio that go back to 1907, one is so old it has a Beckett Commodore burner on it.

[mark beiser]

Let not get into old gravity stuff and just go with old forced air systems with AC, they are more interesting. ;)

The oldest residential split AC and heating system I have seen that was an actual product offering by a manufacturer was a Lennox LSA1 outdoor unit with a matching indoor coil and furnace, all installed when the house was built in 1947. The furnace and coil were changed in 1996, but the outdoor unit was still running as late as 2001 when I changed jobs.

The oldest residential air conditioning system I have seen, that uses refrigerant, was installed in a mansion in Fort Worth Texas in 1936. It was a system built up in the field by an engineering firm that also did some of the first AC in public buildings in north Texas in those days.
It had a large blower, evaperator coil and gas fired heat exchanger built into a thickly insulated enclosure that also had a belt driven compressor in it. It had a water cooled condenser and a cooling tower. The supply air used the origonal duct system for the coal burning heater that was installed when the mansion was built in the 1890's.
It was still functioning in 1998 but has since been replaced with a chilled water/hot water system with small air handlers all over the place.

I have worked on quite a few Carrier and Lennox systems from the early 50's, and a Westinghouse condenser from 1948, as well as a handful of engineered systems from that time period.
I wish I had packed a camera with me when I was working in the Crestline, Arlington Heights and TCU areas of Fort Worth. A lot of the homes in that area were built in the 1890-1940 period by people that had a lot of cattle and oil money to spend on making their homes comfortable in the 30's and 40's when AC became possible in a home if you had enough money to throw at it.
I have seen a lot of remnants of weird systems that were installed during that period that later had more modern equipment installed, but some of the old stuff was abandoned in place.

[aircooled53]

The owner of Dallas Times Herald had ranch just south of Hwy 114 and had this old Carrier with semi-hermetic compressor and condenser outside with double fans. I beleive it was made in 1958 and it was 7.5 ton..

House was in the shape of horseshoe.Big home, remember kichen was really large with 2 sub-zero freezers and sub-zero cooler.
Was purchased later by Ross Perot.

[coolwhip]

HeyBob threw this job at me and I said forget it!




http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/3792/oldboileroc0.jpg:D :D :D

[coolwhip]

I couldnt find any parts for it.:D

[ks ftc]

In the summer of 1991, I removed a water cooled Copeland "built-up" system. The installation date was 1931 or 32. The outdoor temperature was above 100f and the RH was about 50%, so we kept that old dog runnin' as long as possible..

[contactor]

A 1908 coal conversion to nat gas burner, steam boiler in a house downtown still working. Cheap landlord thats an ex plumber. No press. relief or low water C.O. Had a Hartford loop installed. Have to work on a pic.

[furnacedr]

Worked on an old coal converted to oil this morning. ho,s are late 70s and couldn't remember when it got converted to oil. This is a boiler though.

[2hot2coolme]

HeyBob threw this job at me and I said forget it!




http://img110.imageshack.us/img110/3792/oldboileroc0.jpg:D :D :D


Was that thing heating the tropical forest? Looks like moss is growing on it...:cool:

[acmanko]

I seeen a block of Ice with a fan behind it.

[dash]

I saw a picture of the Dicemann,does that count??lol!!!:D

[rimek]

This one is still in use- we did the replacement for the second floor unit- the tenant wanted A/C- I believe this is a williamson coal fired-converted to oil-converted to nat gas finally with the republic burner, and gravity convection. I'll try to find the pix of the chain drive stoker setup that was still there in the coal room/wine cellar.
http://img168.imageshack.us/img168/5592/dscf0006vv2.jpg

[jpb2]

Doest have anything to do with resi stuff but the packing house i worked at part time was an old York ammonia system belt drive and all

[wallynut]

Maybe this one

http://img176.imageshack.us/img176/3325/ncvacation068cc6.jpg

[johnl]

Its not a res system but i though some might find it interesting anyway. I believe the date stamped on the side of the air handler is 1962, This was apparently the first refrigerated vegetable farm storage shed in western canada. It is a 40 ton system with twin 25hp compressors. These pictures were taken after we retrofitted the system from electric defrost to hot gas defrost about 6 years ago. Since these pics were taken we have swapped out both compressors with copelands, repiped the accumulators with inverted traps on the suction line (this was supposed to be done at install but we had a know it all on the job for a bit that didnt think it was necessary) and replaced the condenser (it was also original equipment) I will get some better pics of it this week when im there.
http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o71/jlaffradi/IM000148.jpg
http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o71/jlaffradi/IM000147.jpg
http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o71/jlaffradi/IM000130.jpg
http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o71/jlaffradi/IM000149.jpg

[elkhvac]

we change out a lot of turn of the century conversions. This year we had one that was 1890 converted to ng, than in 1937 a very cool blower assembly was added.

We have ran into a few 1950's split systems but I cant remember the oldest.

[RoBoTeq]

Asa Packer mansion (now a museum) in Jim Thorpe, PA (used to be Mauch Chunk) built in 1861 had a functioning gravity cooling system;


The spiral staircase leads to the cupola, more commonly known as a widow's walk. Contrary to popular belief, our cupola is not a lookout tower. It is used for ventilation, acting somewhat like a chimney. As the hot air naturally rose through the home, the cupola helped to draw the hot air to the third floor.

Opening all the windows on the third floor, as well as the eight windows in the cupola, increased the air flow.

Doubling the impact, the two and a half story ice house located to the rear of The Mansion held 100/100 pound blocks of ice. The Mansion and the ice house were connected underground by ductwork. The ductwork, in turn, would then be loaded with block after block of ice. The cool air would aid in forcing the hot air through the home. Please keep in mind that this did not cool the entire home. It only affected the first floor which would remain 10-15 degrees cooler than the rest of the home, a welcome change considering one was wearing 20-30 pounds of clothing. The Mansion, in its own way, was air conditioned!

This explaination does not do justice what we better understand as thermal convection. The warm air in the mansion rose up the staircase, into the cuppola and out the cuppola windows. This created a negative pressure in the mansion. The cooler air moving down the mountainside behind the house went into the ice storage rooms via huge louvered walls creating a positive pressure pushing into the mansions ducting system.

The difference between the hot air moving out of the mansion and the cooler air pushing into the mansion is what created the forced air draft through the ducting. Had they put ducting into the upper floor rooms, I have no doubt this system would have cooled them as well.

[flames]

I repaired an old floor furnace a couple years ago. The h/o said it was the original and the home was built in the 30's. It looked like the the thing probably weighed 600 pounds - the heat exchanger cells looked like they were 1/4 steel. H/o wasn't interested in replacing because the new equipment would be worth more than the home so I had to retrofit a millivolt valve and generator into the thing. It's still working great.

[`rick`]

You guys got me beat by a mile. I've been in the heat pump biz for almost 30 yrs, and the oldest units I can remember working on were Westinghouse Hi-Re-Li systems. And here I thought I was an old-timer ..

[hook]

i have seen a 60 now 65 year old janitrol furnace...that was before goodman bought the name.not much of a market for heat pumps here in canada...we still burn wood.haha

[Shophound]

The owner of Dallas Times Herald had ranch just south of Hwy 114 and had this old Carrier with semi-hermetic compressor and condenser outside with double fans. I beleive it was made in 1958 and it was 7.5 ton..

House was in the shape of horseshoe.Big home, remember kichen was really large with 2 sub-zero freezers and sub-zero cooler.
Was purchased later by Ross Perot.

I saw something like that in the Northwood Hills neighborhood in North Dallas. Vertical coil, twin fans, semi-hermetic...sounded like a Carlyle 06D or E as it was still running. I was working across the alley on another unit, also fairly old...a Carrier "Round One" with all the pretty yellow wires everywhere.

As a kid I remember the neighborhoods along Churchill Way in N. Dallas having wooden natural draft cooling towers out in the backyard. The compressor and heat exchanger were in the crawl space. An old tech I would talk to in those days said he loved how those things performed but always griped how homeowners neglected caring for the towers. Well, yeah, since a homeowner can't swim in it he's likely not to give a crap about any sort of water treatment for the tower. :D

BTW, my father worked for the Dallas Times Herald for 31 years, so I'd be curious as to who this owner's name of the Herald was that you talked about.

[The Penguin]

belt driven fridigare domestic reach in refrigerator on r12

Lennox dms3 60's I think before the fantastic :rolleyes: DMS4 series

some old boilers all covered in asbestos circa 1940's dang Iwish I took pics of these old junkers

[voleye]

We have several coal conversions still running around us. We average replaceing 2 to 3 a year. Not sure of when they were installed but if they are original then its 80 to 90 years.

[acmanko]

I seen a window the other day, with glass in it.

[absrbrtek]

I have a 1958 17M 33 Carrier 200 ton centrifugal I'm currently working on. The chiller still runs great except a few air leaks. The Barber Coleman controls are from that era also, the ones with the tubes in them. :)

[rich pickering]

Looked at a boiler today, one of the cleanout doors was had MAR 1906 cast on it. The expansion tank looked original. So did the asbestos.

[billygoat22]

What, no talk of Airtemps?

Seen a few of those, and Carriers weathermaker in blue-green in some old commercial buildings.

A frankenified airtemp in a church- they cut a condensor into the system by grafting onto the evap section and leaving the condensor parts in place.


The oldest res I've seen was a package unit in a crawlspace. The condensor was ducted out the wall outdoors. Don't recall the name (blueish). It was supposed to be operable, and was original.