Sometimes the weirdest things bum me out. Right now, I'm quietly raging about house problems.
First off, in my ongoing issues with Tesla's shitty energy products, last week we lost power for an hour, and the battery kicked in. That's the first time since the switching bits (to isolate you from the grid) broke in July. Now the problem is that when the system goes off-grid, the solar fails to synchronize with the battery. (The TL;DR is that alternating current in US houses runs at about 60 Hz, so the solar inverters have to match that so the power can seamlessly flow between solar, battery and house.) When this happened, I was in a long chat session with various support people and they opened a support case. A few days later, the support case disappeared as if it never happened. Remember, it took them six weeks to fix the last problem, and prior issues in prior years took as long, if not longer. They're just the fucking worst. I detailed the problem in email, so we'll see if anything comes from that route. I doubt it. I'm sure I'll have to call, and they'll do everything they can to avoid the problem.
Also last week, the TVX valve on our downstairs AC broke, so it failed to cool the place down. This is very consequential for my office, which is the furthest from the blower and with the door closed, gets no residual cooling from the upstairs units. At the time, and what made me realize something was wrong, is that the blower ran the entire night and the system used about $15 worth of electricity blowing hot air around. The tech believed that the motor had to be replaced, which on this old crappy Lennox stuff has an integrated controller, thus the whole thing has to be replaced. But as they quoted a repair, it didn't exhibit the behavior, so I passed on it. Two days later, today, it did the same thing, running all night. When it's cooling, it does cool, but it gets stuck blowing even when the compressor outside is idle.
So all in, these HVAC repairs are going to cost nearly $2k. It's an awkward spot because replacing the whole thing would cost just under $8k, so it feels like throwing bad after good. We did replace the upstairs last year, with a correctly sized (larger) system that is far more energy efficient, using more than a third less energy. It works so well. That cost $6,500 after a $2k tax credit, which of course the fuckwads in Washington have repealed, so there's no getting that again. We just need the downstairs system to work for another five years or so, when we might bail from here.
Look, I'm acutely aware that I have the good fortune of being able to save for crap like this, but it's that category of stuff that just feels like evaporating money. It's not like new carpet or cabinets or something that you can use and enjoy. As a colleague once put it, these are "in the wall" improvements that you don't see, and those hurt. Then pile on the incompetence of Tesla Energy, and I hate that I can't just rip everything they put in out and get my money back. The solar plant, at least, hits its ROI point next year, meaning all energy after that is "free" relative to the cost of the system. I guess that's something.
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