Three folded quotes sat on the kitchen table of an 1,100 square foot cottage two blocks off the canal, and they read $6,200, $8,900, and $11,000 for what everybody agreed was the same job. The couple who had just bought the place called an air conditioning company Lewes DE neighbors kept recommending, mostly because not one of the first three visits explained where the number came from. That spread is not brand loyalty and it is not greed. Almost all of it comes from three contractors pricing three differently sized machines for one small 1950s house, which means the argument you are refereeing at that kitchen table is about sizing, not about price.
Three Quotes Priced Three Different Machines
Tonnage is the trade’s word for cooling capacity, and it has nothing to do with what the equipment weighs. A two-ton system pulls a set amount of heat out of a house every hour, a three-ton system pulls half again as much, and the gap between those two boxes shows up on the invoice before a single wrench comes out of the truck. The pattern I run into most often on these older shore cottages is that the highest bid is not the most careful one. It is the one that guessed biggest, and bigger equipment drags bigger everything along behind it.
None of the three had measured the house.
A load calculation is the arithmetic that answers one question: how much heat does this specific building gain on a sticky August afternoon? It counts square footage, ceiling height, window area and which way those windows face, insulation, duct leakage, and how many people actually live there. Contractors call it Manual J, after the ACCA procedure it follows, and doing it properly takes an hour or two with a tape measure and a laptop. If you want a rough sanity check before anyone arrives, ENERGY STAR’s free Home Energy Yardstick scores your utility bills against similar houses, which at least tells you whether your cottage loses heat fast or holds it well.
Sizing Drives The Price More Than Brand
Once the load is known, the total stops being mysterious and turns into a list you can check line by line. Any air conditioning company Lewes DE buyers hire should hand over that worksheet without being asked, and in my experience the crews who run the numbers quote smaller equipment than the ones who size a house from the driveway. Oversizing does you no favors. An oversized unit chills the air quickly, then shuts off before it has wrung any humidity out, and you are left with a clammy 74 degree living room that no thermostat setting will fix. On the coast, where August dew points sit in the low 70s, that clamminess matters more than a couple of efficiency points ever will.
Here is the same cottage priced honestly. A correctly sized two-ton system came in at $6,400 installed, the crushed return duct in the crawlspace added $650, the county permit was $175, and a new pad with a fresh disconnect box ran $220, which comes to $7,445 all in. Call it $7,445. Honestly, closer to $7,900, because on a house built in 1953 the electrician usually finds an undersized breaker nobody thought to price.
Answers To What Installers Rarely Explain
Is A Bigger Air Conditioner Safer To Buy?
No, and it is the costliest wrong turn available in this whole process. An oversized system starts and stops constantly, tires its compressor out years early, and leaves the house damp while the electric bill creeps up. If two quotes disagree by a full ton on an 1,100 square foot cottage, at least one of them is wrong about your home.
What Should A Written Quote Actually Show Me?
Model numbers, the tonnage, the efficiency rating, the load calculation the sizing came from, and the warranty term in writing. A quote that lists a brand and a total is asking for trust it has not earned yet. Ask for the missing pieces by email, then notice who answers inside a day and who goes quiet.
The Cheapest Quote Is Rarely The Cheapest System
The $11,000 bid deserves one fair word, because oversizing is not always cynical. A machine that is too big almost never produces an angry phone call about a house that will not cool, only a slow complaint about a house that feels damp, so rounding up is the safer guess for the installer and the expensive one for you. Bryant’s own product page, which I pulled up again in July 2026, puts a three-ton unit at 36,000 BTU per hour and describes it as suitable for homes of 1,500 to 2,400 square feet, and an 1,100 square foot cottage sits nowhere near that range. Two of those quotes were sized for a house nobody in this story owns.
So the low bid was never the bargain and the high bid was never the premium. Both were guesses, and the couple paid $7,445 for the one system that had been measured against their actual walls, windows, and ductwork. Before you compare totals again, ask each installer for the load calculation the price was built on. The quote that can show its work is the only one whose number means anything, and nine times out of ten it lands somewhere in the middle.
