I am so happy to have come across this post! I purchased a condo 4 years ago and am now selling it. I live on the 3rd floor (1 bedroom) however the unit below me is considered one unit and is a 2 floor unit (2 bedrooms). My downstairs neighbor and I started off rocky and since then she's been constantly complaining about excessive noise from my unit. Stomping, slamming doors, using appliances etc in the late hours of the night. It's come to the point where she's escalating to the HOA BOD- however i'm also now selling my unit because I purchased a single family home in a new development and in order to save and put myself out of the misery of living with my neighbor will just live elsewhere while waiting for the new house to be built. If I had known what I know now I would not have opted to purchase a condo on the 3rd floor (in a 4 floor building). 1) Living on the 3rd floor I received noise complaints from my neighbor below me while I also had to endure noise from the person above me. (Being the understanding neighbor that I was I never once complained to the person above me since they have children so I opted for earplugs instead). Mind you I live in a one bedroom and so I never purposely tried to create noise but some things are inevitable like having to walk to my bathroom. I refuse to tiptoe in my own house but I assure you i'm not stomping i'm walking regularly! 2) As many people mentioned you cannot pick your neighbors! I'm going to be honest my community is filled with some downright nasty neighbors. If it's not me dealing with my crazy neighbor there's constantly complaints and random letters on our community corkboard. People complaining about how people park, how people throw away trash, how long the water is shut off for construction. People literally use a notice as a form of communication and will write on it and form conversations on that one piece of paper. 3) Your condo might look/seem nice now but you never know what it'll look like 20-30 years from now. Although i've only lived in my place for 4 years I have to say that I was shocked at the lack of care for the building. My boyfriend got stuck in the elevator once for an hour with a cancer patient in our building on a very hot day and there is barely any ventilation in the elevator and no air conditioning! I later learned from a neighbor that our elevator is the wrong type of elevator for our building. Additionally I think the materials used for our building are just downright poor. I can hear the person in the unit above me snoring. I can't tell the person above me to stop snoring, but that's just to show how it could be a mix of bad materials. At least with an apartment you know it's a somewhat temporary situation.. if you hate it you could potentially move elsewhere with not much risk. Honestly before purchasing my single family home I even considered a townhouse as an upgrade to my condo. I figured that sharing sidewalls with individuals is a lot less worse than sharing floors/ceilings which I think are just terrible and usually amplify noise. At the end of the day i'm happy to be moving away from this situation and moving to a place where I can run the dishwasher and use the overnight cycle at night without someone berating me! It came to the point where my neighbor's requests were aggressive and rude and made me feel uncomfortable living in my own condo.

When we first started having trouble, I asked the office if I was supposed to change the filter or if they were (I reliazed that in the four or so months since we had lived there, I had not once remembered seeing maintenance change the filter in the unit in the attic). They told me that maintenance changed the filters and that I was not to. One thing I did do, however, is I took off the covers to the two intake vents (one downstairs and one upstairs). I could tell this had not been done in a while as there was a lot of paint over the screws of the vent covers. What I found was a tremendous amount of dust/dirt. I vacuumed all of this out. When I mentioned this to the A/C repairman, he jokingly said I probably vacuumed out about 30 years of dust. This is something I routinely would do at the house we previously lived in. Is vacuuming out the intake vents not considered normal maintenance that the apartment is responsible for? I was hestitant to do this myself at first because I did not want to do anything that the apartment complex could later cite against me. Speaking of humidity, I bought an inexpensive digital thememoter that also reads the humidity level. Before the unit was replaced, the humidity would stay around 51 - 55%. After they replaced the outside unit but had not yet replaced the evaporator coil, the humidity got up to 63% or so. Since they have replaced the evaporator coil, it has been reading around 51 - 52%. Is there a limit to what the inside temp can get where the apartment is supposed to legally do something about it? If the temp gets 80+ degrees with the A/C running, is this considered acceptable?

well, you say relatively easy, but keep in mind a new system is just that, a NEW system. they may be able to disconnect and reuse most of the duct work, but there likely will still be new returns needed. and ALL electrical/gas service has to be run new, as well as new linesets. it may not be as easy as you think. i was quoted around 5k to replace my old unit with a 13SEER trane. this was reusing my existing ducts and electrical and running new linesets. call around and get a at least a couple more quotes. there is no way anyone here can tell you if that is right for your situation from only a single quote. also, MAKE SURE they run a Manual-J to properly size teh system. do not trust anyone who just says, yep a 2 ton is what you need.

1137 sq feet on it's own a two ton unit should work ok and in some cases 1137 sq feet with a 2 ton would be oversized. However, load calculations figure things via windows, air volume (height of ceilings, size of doors against a load --- your insulating features of the house etc.) So if your structure has a number of windows among other load raising issues putting in a 2 ton unit may not keep up under all scenarios especially if you are hitting 105 on a regular basis. As far as the indoor air handler goes the manufacturer's make tight fit units, but with the pandemic and supply problems effecting things they probably aren't available right now. On top of all that R410a the refrigerant that the new unit will use is on the cusp of being banned in California by 2025. Unless someone sues or something else your new unit runs low on R410a refrigerant those in Ca may be forced to replace again. So if you can it *might* be better for you to wait a bit. It is expected that the new refrigerant systems should start showing up later this year / early next year. Click to enlarge. I service the Katy, Texas area.