This house is a lot more problematic than we thought
The good news was that the furnace in the basement worked amazingly well, so our heating and hot water needs would be just fine
The whole reason we picked this particular house to rent was due to how old and rustic it was. Now that we are living here, I have come to realize that “old and rustic” are better in theory than in practice. This house is too old, and it has a lot of problems I’ve never run into in any of the more modern homes I’ve lived in. The pipes are noisy, and held together with baling wire and duct tape in several key places. The shingles are coming off the roof in huge swatches. The insulation in the walls is nonexistent, and worst of all there is no central HVAC in this place! My wife and I can handle most of the repairs ourselves, but we immediately called in a local air conditioning tech to examine our home and give us some advice. The HVAC tech said that he had good news and bad news. The bad news was that this place couldn’t accommodate a full sized central HVAC system, and that even if the power grid could handle it there were very few air ducts. The good news was that the furnace in the basement worked amazingly well, so our heating and hot water needs would be just fine. That meant our only real problem was cooling, and he suggested taking the low cost options and getting a portable air conditioner, or a series of them, for the house. It was not the perfect solution to our A/C problem, but it would get the job done for a low price.