My wife and I rent a house, and the air handler in the attic went out two weeks ago. We notified the owner and he hired a local hvac company to install a new one. We went a week without a/c with 100°+ temps outside before it got fixed last Monday. Fast forward to today, and my wife and I come home after spending three days at the lake to find water falling from the ceiling directly onto our new $2,000 reclining leather sofa. The sofa is soaked completely through, the area rug beneath it is completely soaked, and the hardwood flooring is starting to buckle. I went up into the attic to figure out the cause, and find this:
The ass hats who installed the air handler didn’t finish plumbing the condensation pan, so the water was just falling on the press board beneath the air handler instead of draining to the outside of the house. After the better part of a week the water eventually soaked through the press board and insulation, and then finally through the sheet rock ceiling.
I ended up going to Lowe’s and bought the PVC pieces and glue to finish the job that should have been done. Needless to say, our landlord is going to be getting an earful as soon as he responds to our calls.
I rent a house also and while the central AC here is not very old and does work ok - I still keep 2 portable AC units (the type they use in server rooms) tucked away in closets for just in case.
If the central AC here took a dump I would not be suffering while waiting on someone to fix it or having to rearrange MY schedule so they could do the work. They would be working around MY schedule when it was convenient for ME.
Same with respect to back up heaters. My back up heat actually works faster and better than the central unit in this house. Hardly used the central crap at all last winter because of that…
Always have a backup and no harm in having a backup to that.
That pan and the disconnected drain pipe should be the secondary. There is probably an issue with your primary drain. (The pvc coming out the side of the unit.) To me is appears you have bigger issues afoot. The primary drain may be clogged or plumbed incorrectly. See the stob sticking up with no cap? Blow in that and it may unclog your primary drain.
A rep from the company came this afternoon and looked at the issue. He admitted that his crew screwed up the installation. Apparently they didn’t level the unit correctly as well as not connecting the drain pipe to the pan. Now we wait to here from their insurance company.
This is why we had ductless AC installed in our place. No existing ductwork and no desire to have air handling equipment in the attic, or give up a work bench in the garage to house it.
The added benefit is I have individual temperature control in 6 rooms.
I’d be pissed too, but unless the company and or landlord total D bags, it will get made right. Two, you should be happy it was not your house it happened to. The owner is the one who will have a major $ bill due to the damage caused, vs you. Sounds like on your end, just the couch that needs to be replaced. Landlord will see a bill a whole lot bigger then that I suspect, but should also be covered under the companies insurance I’d expect, so he should be ok too.
When we had our wood floors redone we had a few small issues with the company. But in the last room, they ran short of stain- like for about ten square feet- and used a different color to finish…. I called the owner and had him come over, didn’t tell him the exact problem. He was a little hot, I just looked at him, told him to go look in that room. He went in, came out. I raised and eye-brow, he shrugged his shoulders and said it would be fixed. Workers sometimes not be working right.
I’m at work and can’t see the pictures due to our firewall, so I apologize if I miss anything that’s evident in them. My dad owns a small hvac company, and I have minimal knowledge of them.
The main condensate drain coming off the air handler sounds like it was not plumbed correctly or was stopped up somehow. Even so, there are typically safe guards in place. The drain pan should have its own drain, which sounds like it wasn’t working or wasn’t installed at all. There should also have been a float switch in the drain pan that should cut the air handler off once the water in the drain pan reaches a certain level to prevent exactly this from happening.
That is the worst one I have seen. When we made them for a factory I worked at, we filled the pvc with sand and used a heat gun to bend them. They don’t get flattened out like that. Every pipe I have seen like this was done by a new guy. It is the same thing we did when we ran PVC conduit when running electrical to certain machinery locations that were in corrosive environments. Steel could not be used.
I concur with both of these posts. That p-trap looks overly bent and flattened in the pic. Though the pan drain certainly should have been connected it is only the backup.
Frankly, being as it was installed over finished living space I would have likely opted for a condensate pump as part of the install.
