Hi asolo, What do you mean by "Are your voltages correct"? Do you mean was it wired to the house correctly? I had an electrician check my 3-prong plug, and the HHGregg people connected it. Before I call GE, I should probably test the temperature of water on the various settings, right? Thanks for your help.

I don't think the coil will help unless you also replace the airhandler as well. If by modular homes you mean mobile homes, the duct system under the home is usually all the same size from front to back. This generally requires a special type of airhandler & evaporator coil that works at a high static pressure. Nordyne, Coleman & Intertherm are that main ones i can think of. If you decided to get a new coil, make sure you get the "M" or "W" style coil with the expansion valve. These new style coils can handle the extra refrigerant that most new 13 seer units need to operate correctly. Hope this helps

I'm in the LA area too and I've been trying to replace my broken down 3.5 ton condenser. Unfortunately, I've been stuck doing too much research (analysis paralysis), but I've learned a lot. My house is 1430 sqft, long wall faces east and gets the hot afternoon sun, I'm on a raised foundation with crawl space, insulation R25 in attic, hardwood floors, no insulation in walls, double pane windows, built in 1952, 3 bd, 2 ba, etc. You need to get someone to do a load calculation (Manual J) which takes into account your insulation in the attic, insulation in the walls, insulation in the crawl space, sqft of windows facing east/west/south/north, sqft walls facing east/west, sqft of doors, type of floor, volume of your house, sqft of house, temperatures that you want to set inside the house in winter/summer, climate in your area, number of people in house, number of appliances, etc. All these factors determine your cooling needs in the summer and your heating needs in the winter. Or you can learn how to do this yourself at http://loadcalc.net I would guesstimate that no insulation in the attic, no insulation on the walls, no insulation under the floor, and drafty old windows probably raises your cooling needs to close to 5-tons. A 5-ton condenser and matching furnace are a lot more expensive to run/operate than a 3-ton system. I ran the numbers on my house and my cooling needs were a little over 4 tons without attic insulation and without wall insulation. I have R25 in the attic and I'm adding R15 wall insulation as I type this message and my cooling needs went down to a little under 3 tons (at 35.5k BTUs). So, my wall and attic insulation reduced my cooling needs by 1-ton (a little over 12k BTUs). I think the attic insulation makes more of a difference than the the wall insulation, so I recommend that you get that done asap. It really helps. Now, getting back to equipment. I've been following the advice on this forum not to get low end equipment. This advice has taken me in a two month quest for a reasonably priced mid-level equipment from a good company (Trane, American Standard, Rheem), but I'm having trouble finding it. The best quotes I've gotten are for Amana and Lennox. The most expensive are for Trane, AS, and Rheem. Goodman is very popular probably because of the price. They have good warranty, but the equipment is not well regarded in this forum. Almost everyone says it's better to get a great installer with low end equipment than high-end reliable equipment with a bad installer. I think I met two really bad installers and two good installers. It's a feeling, but it's hard to know for sure. Some dealers send their salesperson to talk to you, so you never meet the installer. One way to protect yourself is to get a permit. In my area, this ensures that the refrigerant level is checked to make sure it's appropriate for your system. That's all the permit does in my city. Another way to protect yourself is to qualify for rebates. The rebates from So Cal Edison require an outside inspector to inspect/test your ducts and install. The problem with rebates is that it costs more money to pay for these tests and the installers/dealers build in a markup when you try to get rebates. I got quotes with rebates from Lennox and Rheem and both were in the $9500 range with the possibility to get about $2700 in rebates. It's scary trying to qualify for the rebates because you might have to pay additional fees in repairs in order to meet the requirements of the rebates. Now that I've written a book on this topic, my advice to you is to get a load calculation done and see what your heating and cooling needs are. Figure out if it's worth getting the attic insulation to cut down on equipment size. Remember that it's more expensive to run a 5-ton system than a 3-ton system of equal SEER. Oversized equipment might cause your system to short-cycle which may be bad for the equipment. In So Cal, we really need the a/c and not the heater so much. So, matching a 5-ton a/c condenser with the right 5-ton 2000 CFM blower in a furnace will result in an oversized furnace. Your heating needs are probably 3-tons 36K BTUs without insulation, but you are putting a 100K BTU furnace in order to get the matching blower in the furnace to blow the cooling air at the right speed. Also, 3-ton equipment is cheaper than 5-ton equipment. So, the savings in equipment price and the operational savings can probably pay for your attic insulation. I'm paying $1600 to insulate all my outside walls. I insulated my attic myself using encapsulated batts from Home Depot. I might have to pay a little extra fill in some of the attic areas that I didn't do such a great job on. I'm talking to the wall insulators about doing this extra work for a small fee. I want them to blow some loose cellulose into those areas that need it. Okay, you might not have finished reading all this, but see my other posts on price and equipment. I researched 3-ton systems.

Well your situation is rather unique, but in the terms of the warranty from manufacturer, the burden of proof still would fall on you. Homebuilders are not known for providing warranties / registering equipment --- there are a slew of home builder problems on this board. Some HVAC related, with many others completely different problems. I doubt the GC put it in his name because this would require work on his part, his name probably appeared there because he was the one who bought the machine from the manufacturer. Homebuilders 'typically' do not register the equipment, they are more interested in going off to the next build. They build, it's what they do. How do I know this? Because had he registered it in his name the warranty would be 10 years and not 5. If the equipment is not 'officially' registered there is no record of who 'owns' it, except of course who bought it. Equipment made these days have codes built in as to knowing the day and in some cases the hour in which the machine came off the assembly line. Without registration the manufacture allows up to 90 days beyond the date in which the machine came off the production line. So Mr./Mrs. home owner comes along buys a new home... wow everything is new, looks great. No worries everything is 'new'. You have a life so you don't concern yourself with things that 'could' go wrong. Like documentation of equipment warranties and things like that. As I said above, right - wrong or indifferent this is the way things work in this realm. (you don't have to like it, I didn't make up any of these rules -- I am not a homebuilder. I am the one who comes in and corrects homebuilder mistakes. I am not paid by the homebuilder -- I am paid by YOU. The homeowner.) It is up to you, the home owner to 'make sure' everything is to your liking. Including the name in which is on the contract specifying who owns the equipment at your home. Equipment warranties can be expensive for a manufacturer, there's paper work processing to validate that the warranty is credible or not, there's hacks out there that are claiming warranty when in fact there is nothing wrong. So because of all this nonsense that happened in the past has put us where we are now. I don't doubt that it took you time to sort this out. But in the eyes of the manufacturer they are standing there holding the tiniest violin in the world and playing 'Comb By Ah My Lord'.