Hey all...I was out here in June and early July investigating options for replacing my older Carrier, 3 ton, 13 SEER HVAC system (outside unit was very noisy and had a hard start added to it, but we felt we were on borrowed time)...Long story short, we went with installing a new air handler (same variable speed, etc) and a new outside unit (Carrier, 3 ton 16 SEER upgraded outside "cage")...When they installed the system, the old system didn't seem to have the appropriate "plenums", so they added new plenums (at no charge to me). Ever since we had this new system, electric bills were higher and we checked out our usage and it seemed to be in line with our usage the year before, so we didn't dwell on that at the time...Our issue is that although the thermostat states 72 (we set it there and never change it - set on cool)...It seems to be hotter than 72....Our remote control for our fireplace has a temp reading on it, so we moved it from room to room and it was pretty consistent with saying it was really 74-75 degrees in each room. We contacted the company that installed the unit and they came out to do their check up (post install checks and balances, I guess)...They found that there were a couple of places that were not sealed all that well on the air handler, so they rectified that, but didn't feel it would create the issues we felt we were dealing with. They started talking about humidity and that made sense...It was a humid 72 versus the 72 we were used to...At any rate, they tested the defrost board (not sure that is the right term) and decided that it needed to be replaced. Keep in mind, this is supposed to be a brand new unit right out of the box! We weren't happy that a part needed to be replaced right off the bat, but it wasn't costing us, so we accepted that as a potential fix.
We still experienced the same issues over the next 30 days and had the company sales rep come back out. He used some commercial readers (sticks that read temp, humidity and some other stuff) and left them in two different rooms over a period of 10 or so days. They just sent us a copy of one of the data results and the temp only varied by 3 degrees, but the humidity varied considerably (up to 61.1% - varied a lot)...
Does anyone have any suggestions as to what could be causing this new system to feel like it isn't doing as good of a job as my old failing 13 SEER Carrier system???
JamesRiverAir_HVAC_MonitoringReport.pdf