About Mark Curant

He isn't an HVAC contractor. He's the person on the other side of the invoice: a business owner who runs several brick-and-mortar retail stores in the Caribbean, where residential power costs more than 31¢ per kilowatt-hour, commercial rates run higher, and turning the AC off isn't an option. Customers don't come back to a hot store.

Expensive power is only half of it. On an island grid, outages, brownouts and voltage surges are part of normal operations, and each one is a risk to compressors and control boards. Keeping stores cool means planning for that: surge and voltage protection on the equipment, backup power, and systems that restart safely when the grid comes back. Losing a unit in the middle of summer means lost sales, spoiled stock and an emergency replacement at whatever price is on offer.

None of that came with a manual. Mark taught himself how the systems work so he could make his own decisions instead of taking every quote at face value. He learned to tell a fair repair price from an inflated one, to ask the questions that expose an unnecessary replacement, and to do the routine maintenance himself (filters, coil cleaning, drain lines, basic troubleshooting) that keeps small problems from turning into expensive service calls. He knows when he's being overcharged, and he wants readers to know too.

Years of paying those bills and protecting that equipment taught him that the biggest cooling costs usually aren't the repair calls. They're the decisions made without numbers: buying the cheapest system, keeping an inefficient one too long, or paying for efficiency that never pays back. He built the SEER savings calculator to run those numbers for his own stores, then turned it into this site so homeowners and small-business owners could do the same before spending $5,000–$15,000 on a system.