Three porches on one block: cooling the bungalows around the courthouse square

Three porches on the same block

Walk one block off Ohio Avenue, which is US 129 where it passes the courthouse, in any direction and you will pass three different problems wearing the same deep front porch. The first house has a package unit sitting on blocks beside the kitchen, installed in the eighties, with a single supply trunk under the floor and no return at all except the gap under the hall door. The second has four window units and a wall heater. The third was renovated by the last owner, has a modern split system in the attic, and is still hot in the back bedroom because the attic is a hundred and forty degrees and the duct to that room is forty feet of flex.

These are the houses of the downtown grid: frame bungalows and cottages from the 1900s through the 1940s, raised on brick piers, built with tall ceilings, double-hung windows and transoms, in the years before anyone expected to seal a house. They were designed to breathe. Our job is to cool them without asking them to stop.

What a 1920s bungalow asks of an air conditioner

The honest answer is: less capacity than you’d guess and more attention to where the air goes. A tall-ceilinged frame house with plaster walls and a shaded porch does not have the heat gain of a 1990s ranch with a west-facing slider. Oversizing it, which is what happens when someone sizes by square footage and rounds up, produces a system that drops the temperature in eight minutes, then quits before any moisture has left the air.

Ductless, ducted, or a package unit behind the house

There are three ways to do this well, and we have done all three within sight of the courthouse.

• Ductless wall heads or a slim-duct cassette in the ceiling of a hall. No attic needed, each room controlled on its own, almost nothing cut into the plaster. Right for houses with no usable attic and owners who want the interior left alone.
• A horizontal air handler in the crawlspace with sealed, insulated metal or rigid duct strapped to the joists and real floor returns. Right where the floor is high and the crawlspace stays dry.
• A pad-mounted package unit behind the house, with the duct run under the floor. Simplest and cheapest, and the usual reason a downtown house already has one. The usual replacement is the same configuration, done tighter.

City gas, city water: the in-town advantages

Downtown sits on City of Live Oak water and sewer and on the city’s natural gas system, which is a combination almost nothing else in Suwannee County has. The gas means a furnace is a genuine option for the hard-freeze nights that reach down into the teens here most winters, instead of electric strip heat on a heat pump. Both change what we recommend compared to a house out on the county roads. The electric meter is different too: inside the city limits it reads FPL rather than the co-op, so the August bill these owners hand us comes on FPL letterhead and follows FPL’s rate schedule.

The north side around Heritage Park

North of the grid, around the ninety-acre Heritage Park and Gardens estate, the houses get younger: mid-century block on slabs, 1980s and 90s ranches, a few newer homes with attic systems. These are conventional repair and replacement jobs, capacitors in August and heat pumps nearing twenty, and the drive is the same.

Getting to the square from Fairmont Lane

Downtown Live Oak is worked out of Cook’s one address, in Palm Coast, 144 miles and two hours forty-five by I-10, leaving the interstate at exit 283 and following US 129 south until the brick storefronts of Historic Downtown come up on both sides. Downtown calls are scheduled into a Suwannee County day, the truck arrives with the parts an old house is likely to need, and a dispatcher answers at 2 a.m. for the 2 p.m. price. The owners are one family, the new equipment is Lennox, and the old equipment gets repaired whatever its badge.