The only way to really know is to take a cooling loss on the house. This being a replacement you must remember the unit must be large enough to feed your your ductwork. At the very least they should meaure your ductwork. It gets a little to much to go into in a few lines but one ton of cooling is equal to 12,000 btu's. For ex. a 4 ton unit is 48,000 BTU'S. A 3/12 ton is 42,000.

Thanks FlseaDog & WritersBlock. FlseaDog...I'm not sure how far Sarasota, Longboat Key, etc. are from us. I'll have to check. My DH doesn't want to drive too far...we did enough driving to get here! WritersBlock...We were in Punta Gorda yesterday but I don't remember Burnt Store Road...we'll check it out. Punta Gorda did look like it was all country clubs! But the beaches are less crowded than in Englewood and they just generally seemed like a nicer beaches overall (bigger/deeper, for one thing). We'll be going back at least one or two more times...I prefer ocean/gulf swimming to a pool! We're also going to check out Venice.

"it does not spin between the wash and rinse." I think it is probably another Energy Star "idea" to conserve more water in the disguise of a traditional looking top loader. I vaguely recall a mention or two on one of the FLer threads that some of the newest models are attaining that highest energy/water conservation level by eliminating interim spins between washes and rinses on additional cycles (other than delicate & hand wash)--ones that are traditionally thought to be more "regular" such as normal, heavy duty, .... I think Towels cycles may be one of the few that has not been messed with traditional rinse & spin sequences inn cycles. It's getting to the point I want to see all this insane conservation stuff abolished. The usual unsuspecting people who just throw the wash in and come back when its finish with their new washer and they begin itching due to poorly rinsed fabrics. and unfortunately the machine is going to be blamed and perceived as a piece of junk. Or they figure out what the issue is and begin doing multiple added rinses or simply starts a quick wash at the end of the previous cycle to get better rinsing. Kind of akin to when phosphates were removed from dishwasher detergents and cleaning results tanked and people were blaming the machine and replacing with new models that still yielded poor results. (And my next oldest sister was one of those with the dishwasher ""issue". She put up with it for almost a year and then commented to me her "problem". I told her about the reformulated detergents. Her solution, she began washing all her dishes and stuff by hand. So much for water conservation.

There is no such thing as solid wood cabinets. They don't make them like that anymore. Technically, they're all wood as even particle board and Mdf is made out of wood. You need to specify plywood. I learned this the hard way when looking around and saw all those "wood" advertisements.