Owner gc/ and bad hvac company

AC\DC

Senior Member
Location
Oregon
Occupation
EC
This could be my problem, but I don’t know, so I had a large Subdivision the owner‘s building them , just the 1700 square-foot home nothing fancy so I gave him 200 amp service. I asked them. What are you doing for heating and all this other jazz his son told me Electric range, gas, water heater, and furnace no plans whatsoever no information whatsoever so I base it on a general home. That’s how I come up with the service size. Well when I go to wire it he has the heat pump outside not a big deal. It’s a little 32 amp 240 V.

I go and look at the furnace no indication of any additional heat strips so I’m like this must just be a blower motor kind of big but whatever.

Two weeks later, he calls and says where’s the circuit for the heater I said I asked you and no one told me you just gave me the unit outside. HVAC guy says well you could’ve looked inside and looked at the breaker..
My response is you’re supposed to mark what’s going in this unit size and give me information so pound sand..

The units 100 amp furnace. So now he’s pushing my load quite high. I’m thinking of having to tell him since you gave me no information and I sized your service. We’re pushing it. You might have to cut the heat strips back…

I asked them for all the information and they gave it to me as they please so I’m thinking of writing him a letter and saying due to the lack of information we are not held responsible for any of this stuff we sized it based on what information we were provided if anything additional comes, it is at the owners expense that we were doing time material because of the lack of electrical plans and information we received
 
I have seen several jobs like this recently where the GC said everything is gas then suddenly its all electric its odd how often this is happening,
Propane was king for as long as I have been around, but heat pumps and prices are changing things.
I am told if you pencil out the tank charges, delivery fees, dont forget their annual tank inspection fee, and all the other hidden taxes and charges and what not for propane therms -- BTU--to--kWH here the PNW all electric costs far less to operate, and thats before the price hike this month. The only advantage of propane is you can store it and use it during a outage.
If your in a town in Oregon with a real methane gas utility with pipes in the street IDK methane gas is cheaper and I used to say they would have to be nuts to use heat strips if they had methane, but heatpumps are right on the heels of methane, because they move heat rather than creating it, they often operate at 300%+ efficiency (COP of 3.0) where are a gas forced air is at best 96% efficient.

The best methane gas furnaces delivers 0.96 units of heat for every 1 unit of gas, a heatpump can easily deliver 3 units of heat per unit of electricity. Heat strips are 1 unit of heat per unit of electricity. For really cold snaps they used to say you need those heat strips as a backup when heatpumps can nolonger grab heat from outside, so the HVAC guys sell them still, but newer heat pumps can power thru our cold snaps without heat strips now, so your customer probably got sold something they will never use.
 
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