Damn those previous owners!!

You know it’s hot when Gabby, the whiner and talker, doesn’t say a thing. She was just looking at us, flopped on the tiles. Every once in a while, you’d hear a very weak mrow from her. Punk just lay there. It was too hot for her to say anything and there was nothing I could do about it.
The stupid AC decided to not work properly. It would blow cold air but it just wasn’t blowing enough. You could turn the AC on and in 4 hours it might go down 4 degrees. That’s not right, especially when your house is 89 F. Plus the humidity. It was nasty.
Thankfully we have tile floors in the kitchen and hallways downstairs, so that was something cool for the girls to lie on in the heat of the day. Gabby positioned herself in front of the one blower that is near the floor. Smart cat that one.
Other than that, they just lounged on the floor and gave us piteous looks as if to say- It’s awful. Please do something! So we did- we let them outside at night. We normally don’t do that during the week but it was cooler outside than inside. (If we had a hammock and mosquito netting we would have been there too… or a tent.) They thought it was the greatest thing ever. Of course I woke up to a few dead lizards and bugs, but that’s a small price to pay for the kitties comfort.
AC repairman #1 came yesterday. He found the problem within minutes and basically knew what the problem was as I described it. Unfortunately, it’s going to cost us to repair and it’s not even our fault. The coil and duct are completely gunked up and blocked. So while we could feel cold air coming from the unit and it was working really well, there was no air distribution whatsoever. Apparently, the people who owned the house before us, which I’m now convinced was an elderly couple, never changed their air filters or never even had them. It’s that icky. The guy opened up the heating unit and just grabbed a handful of stuff to show me. He said that the people who installed the BRAND NEW unit should have noticed this or at least the guy who was here, not even a month ago, to fix our clog should have checked it. Heck, our house inspector should have noticed it. Argh.
But at least he said that our unit is really good and even our heating unit is pretty good. It just hadn’t been maintained properly. It definitely wasn’t our fault on this one. He could tell that our house is relatively clean (mostly clutter) and that we changed our filters. He even gave us really good tips on how to service it ourselves and help keep our cooling costs down. I think we found our HVAC/AC company.
It all makes sense now. It hasn’t been cooling right at times, there has been a dank, musty smell every once in a while that we could never figure out. The clog in the condensation pipe makes sense now. So fun. At least the company gives discounts to us home warranty people so it’s not as bad as it could be, but still. It was still awful in the house last night but at least we knew we could run the air all night.
The people will be coming later on this afternoon to clean everything up. I can’t wait to have a cool house again.
Lesson(s) learned: CHANGE THOSE AIR FILTERS!! (We change ours every 60 days.) Check every little thing if you are buying an older house. There are so many details we should have looked at that we know about now.