Our downstairs furnace went out yesterday. The ten-year old builder's cheapest-piece-of-crap-they-could-legally-install just didn't have any more life left in it. The upstairs, while still functioning fine at the moment, wasn't much better off.

Since, it's cheaper to install two together rather than a year apart, we decided to get both replaced.

Our air conditioners were running well but they weren't exactly efficient and who knows how much life they had left. Again, it is much cheaper to install a furnace and air conditioner together rather than piecemeal. Also, we plan on expanding our upstairs and so we will soon need to move up to a 3 ton* from our current 2 ton upstairs.

So, we replaced our two air conditioners while we were at it. They are a little...what's the word..."larger" than our old ones. No doubt, because we moved up from 10 seer* units to 16 seer. In theory, we should see an energy reduction of 37.5% (1 - 10/16). Interestingly, new homes/air conditioners now must be a minimum of 13 seer. Hopefully now, we won't have to worry about anything heating/air related for a long, long, time.

Finally, we upgraded our old classic analog thermostats to a pair of modern Honeywell 7-day programmable thermostats, in for a penny....

* A ton of refrigeration is approximately equal to the cooling power of one ton (2000 pounds) of ice melting in a 24-hour period. Also equal to 12,000 BTU/hour, or 3517 watts.

* SEER stands for Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio and is the cooling output in BTU's (British thermal unit) divided by the total electric energy input in watt-hours.