ACCORDING TO OUR JANUARY 2019 Property Condition Assessment (PCA), our school building’s HVAC units (= furnace, A/C fan coil, and rooftop A/C condenser) were likely to need replacement by 2024. So for more than a year, I have been bracing for an equipment failure any day now.
Below the jump, I recount the ironic tale of how I learned this past week that we can expect many more years of life from our HVAC equipment in that school building.…
The story
Because our synagogue’s financial ledgers show no major HVAC expenditure since 2012, I assumed that the information in the PCA report was still accurate.
Rather, this year I set aside (on paper) $10K within the Maintenance Fund (which is set up to receive quarterly allocations from member dues and Building assessment payments) for the expected near-term replacement, in accordance with our recent reserve study. After all, our preschool needs reliable and functional HVAC.
Meanwhile, our newest committee member, Motz Feinberg, has been soliciting bids for an air scrubber for this HVAC system. Last week, I saw in an email that one of those technicians told him, “The furnace was manufactured 01/2019.” Which implied that it had been installed sometime during that year—just a few years ago!
Upon reflection, I realized that the replacement furnace must have been paid for directly by an outside funding source, rather than being channeled through the synagogue’s accounts. That kind of payment arrangement used to occur occasionally—especially when the funds came from the Lawrence Kasdon Trust, which was a bequest to Mishkon more than 20 years ago.
So I wrote to Brett Barenholtz, the trustee of that trust, who graciously and promptly confirmed that yes, indeed, he had arranged for the installation and payment—not only of the furnace but also of the A/C coil and rooftop condenser. He even produced a copy of the September 2019 invoice.
Silly me. It hadn’t even occurred to me to check the furnace nameplate myself. If I had done so, I could have planned for more pressing uses for those reserve funds (see below).
Happily, our record-keeping has improved in recent years. In fact, since 2022, this blog has served as one of the main channels of institutional memory for our facilities management. So for posterity, I am recording what was purchased in 2019:
About the existing equipment
5-ton capacity for all three components:
• 80% efficiency, 120K BTU up-flow American Standard gas furnace
• 14 SEER American Standard rooftop condenser
• 14 SEER up-flow ADP evaporator coil
The A/C system meets the minimum legal standard for energy efficiency (= 14 SEER), meaning that much more efficient units were also available, but they would have cost more up front. (If an energy cost/benefit analysis was done at the time, it apparently concluded that the extra expense would not pay for itself very quickly.)
Looking ahead
The expected useful life of our furnace (and A/C fan coil) is 25 years; and the rooftop condenser, 20 years—according to the PCA.
Hence since both units were replaced less than 6 years ago (in Sept. 2019), we can expect to replace them again in 19 and 14 years, respectively.
This means that most of the $10K in reserve funds that we had set aside for imminent replacement can now be freed up for more urgent needs. That is the good news!
(According to standard facilities management principles, we should keep maybe $1K in reserve at this time, while saving up a little more each year for the eventual replacement.)
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