Our IndieDwell Home, Part 6, or, Revelation 3:15
The last section of the story of our broken IndieDwell home focused on the flooring. This final section is about the heating and cooling system. IndieDwell doesn’t really feature that heavily in this part of the story. Our problems, while stemming from our choice to hire them to build our home, are not really their problem. The only thing that I can say about them is that we were told early on that we should expect to pay about $50/mo in electricity for our incredibly energy-efficient home. Last year we paid an average of over $200/mo. The bill was north of $400 in the coldest parts of the year. There are multiple reasons for that (we built an out building that is heated, we have an electric snow melt system) but I installed sensors on all our electrical circuits to monitor exactly what each appliance draws. Even when I remove all the extras, our home is far less efficient that we’d hoped.
We have a Samsung mini-split air source heat pump as our primary (really sole) source of heating and cooling. There are a couple backup electric coil heaters in the walls, but we never use them. The HVAC system consists of a condenser that sits on our patio connected by coolant lines to a head unit in the dining room and one in each of the bedrooms.
You may recall from the second post in this series that our HVAC contractor was hired under the assumption that he would be making some connections and filling the system with coolant. That’s what we were told to communicate to him by IndieDwell. The reality was all of the equipment was still in boxes when the house arrived. Our contractor had to mount the interior units, he had to tear up the drywall to get the connections made in the walls (which I had to come back and repair), install the outdoor unit on a stand that wasn’t included and program the system to function correctly.
He made a comment at one point that he’d never installed a Samsung system before - but they were all basically the same. Cue ominous music.
He struggled for about a week to get the thing working in between all his other jobs. He hadn’t budgeted time for us because he didn’t think he needed to. The whole system just didn’t end up working very well. We fought with it over our first winter - it would blow cold air and kept the house at about 62 degrees off and on. The bedroom units seemed to work better - but they were heating small spaces.
Our HVAC guy decided there was a leak. He came back over the course of several months to look for the leak, but never seemed to have the right equipment for it. He would drive the wrong truck or have left his equipment at another job. He refilled our system a few times, which made the whole thing work great for a few days, and then the problems would come back.
He would spend some time tinkering with it, scratch his head and say he’d never seen anything like it, talk to Samsung tech support, and eventually give up. He really didn’t know what he was doing, so after awhile I realized I was going to have to start paying someone to get the thing fixed.
It was July of 2022 when the air conditioner just quit altogether. It was hot. We called Bill’s Heating to come take a look at it. They confirmed that it was not working right and they got the outdoor unit to flash an error code that the technical manual said meant “Call Tech Support.” They told me if I wanted to have them do that, they would have to come back later and it would be $125/hr to sit on the phone with Samsung and figure it out. I didn’t really have much of an option at that point so on July 14 they came back and worked with Samsung to diagnose the problem for 2 hours. The notes on the invoice read:
Working on this Samsung mini split, 1 head isn’t cooling and the other 2 are. Called tech support and ran through a bunch of tests. Tried switching valve body from another circuit to see if living room would cool. Nothing happened. Tech support said we have a bad EEV on the outdoor unit. Unit is a samsung and and can only order parts online.
Our unit was still under warranty for parts, so I called Bill’s to ask about getting that process started. The woman who answered the phone said that they didn’t work with Samsung and could not get parts for warranty work. I had spoken to Samsung already about this and was told that there was a local distributor in town that would sell Samsung parts for warranty work. The woman on the phone said that they would not buy them from that distributor. Since their preferred distributor did not carry them, they refused to purchase them. When I asked how I was supposed to proceed, I was told to find a vendor that would do warranty work on Samsung. When I asked why Bill’s was willing to charge me $250 to diagnose a problem they were unwilling to fix, she didn’t have much to say.
So I began my quest for a Samsung authorized service provider. There is one guy in Spokane. Airforce One Heating and Cooling. I called him at least 6 times and he never returned my messages. I then called Samsung and they tried to help me find someone by suggesting that I call Airforce One Heating and Cooling in Spokane. After that they suggested that I call their distributor in Coeur d’Alene, Keller Supply, for recommendations. All three of Keller Supply’s recommendations told me that they didn’t work on Samsung equipment. I then called the Keller Supply in Spokane and they referred me to a guy in Spirit Lake who said he thought he knew a guy.
He put me in touch with Rob. Rob had been a missionary in Uganda for the last 10 years doing construction and maintenance for an organization I was aware of called Far Reaching Ministries. He was home on furlough and was working as an HVAC tech. Apparently there are a lot of Samsung mini-splits in Uganda.
Rob got to work on the problem and quickly found out that there was a bad sensor telling the unit that it was overheating so it would shut off. It was not overheating - the sensor needed replacing. Rob just removed the sensor and everything started to work great. He said that it would be fine like that while he ordered the part, which arrived on August 17th (happy anniversary Joanna) and he installed it the next week (because we were out of town celebrating our anniversary). He charged us something silly like $100 for his time. He was very kind and generous.
But now it’s winter again and our house is cold. The bedrooms still work fine, but the living room just stops working at night and ends up about 62 degrees in the morning. I reached out to Rob again in November and he was traveling. I circled back in January and he was still traveling. I asked him if he could recommend someone else and he could not.
So, in February of 2023, we have a nearly new Samsung mini-split system that might just be programmed wrong or have a small leak or need a different sensor….but no one in a 250 mile radius of our house is willing or able to service it. I’m actually considering having a local company come in and replace the whole system with a different brand that I could actually get service on. Turns out there are 4 Samsung repair guys in Boise.
North Idaho’s Most Unwanted
I’ll spend one more post wrapping up our IndieDwell experience with my overall thoughts.