You’ll hear from ac techs and salespeople that efficiency and seer rating is a super important metric when deciding what AC to replace. 

Play around with an online calculator and you’ll see it’s not really worth it. 

https://www.seerenergysavings.com

As you can see from my pictures, going from a 14 seer1 system to a 17 seer2 system is only going to save you around $2k over 10 years. 

And I can tell you that the difference between a 14.3 seer2 system (which is the new minimum seer rating) And a 17 seer system, usually ends up being about $1.5-2.5k more for the customer. 

So you’re just going to make back that money over 10 years, and the higher seer equipment (in my experience) is usually less reliable. Because they have to design it right on the edge of what’s possible. Also a lot of the time the components will cost ALOT more if they fail than their low seer counter parts.

If instead of paying more for your system you just put that extra money in a savings account or CD, you’d come out way ahead at the end of the 10 years.

The electrical grid is only designed to support so much power draw, but people want to keep building houses and adding them onto that same grid. 

The city/state doesn’t want to update the grid, so they force ac companies to make equipment more efficient. 

10% efficiency increase won’t save you that much on your energy bill, but it means they can build 10% more houses without improving the grid.

It’s just the government pushing off infrastructure improvement onto the citizens. 

I thought that’s what taxes are for? 

Don’t get memed by seer rating! Use a seer calculator and do your due diligence on quotes.

It might be right for you, but it might not! 

How important is efficiency?