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Ken...

The problem is my kitchen, dining, and family room back share a common wall
with my neighbor's unit.  Her air conditioner is within inches of that common
wall.  The building's concrete foundation happens to be very thin because the
contractor cut corners wherever he could (and was sued by angry homeowners
when the complex was new, about 20 years ago for that and several other
construction problems that somehow passed inspection.

After our big 1/17/94 Northridge earthquake, my neighbor replaced her old air
conditioner with a new one, and that is the puppy that's causing the
vibrations.   It's a good unit... but is sitting on the thin shell which is
our concrete foundation and it's that foundation being too thin which is
causing the vibrations to be felt in my unit.  It's just too flimsy to remain
motionless when the air conditioners are on, so it vibrates...

The air conditioning specialists whom I spoke with all said that without doing
costly major work (IF the condo association would let us make changes to the
building's foundation) on the foundation of our two units.  I'm not about to
even MENTION this to Maria, my neighbor, as this is not like making a
inexpensive minor repair!

I feel this is just something I must live with as long as I live where I do,
however aggravating and physically uncomfortable it is.  However, I've been
looking into moving down the coast towards the San Diego area where my eldest
daughter lives.  That would sure take care of the problem!!

Barb Mallut
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Ken Becker said:

"Barb, maybe you could put some carpeting with a padding under it where you
hang out the most, so the vibrations from the A/C unit would not reach your
chair?  Actually, if they wanted to they have three options to reduce the
vibrations from the unit, they could use a device which modifies the power fed
to the compressor motor, I believe it is called a power factor controller,
which is mostly designed to reduce power used by a motor. I have seen it
demoed in Home Depot stores and you can feel how much smoother the motor runs,
and they show a meter that proves it cuts the amount of power used. They could
probably change or beef up the compressor motor mounting, to stop the
vibration from going through the floor. OR they could just replace the whole
unit with a new one. YOu will say why would they spend that kind of money,
right? Well my folks replaced a working 14 year old a/c unit and cut their
electric bill to less than one third!   from $268 to $80!!! Plus the electric
company gave a rebate of several hundred dollars towards the cost of the new
unit. This saves them money by not having to built new or bigger power plants.
I don't know if that is done by other power companies? "