We all want our appliances to last a while, especially our air conditioning systems since we’ve invested hundreds, if not thousands of dollars into them. We don’t envy the thought of purchasing a new one so we’ve created an fun infographic to help! Here are some maintenance and safety tips to extend the life of your system based on where your live here in San Diego:
Spring is beautiful—flowers in bloom, animals coming out of hibernation, and a world that is flourishing with life. Unfortunately, spring also means allergies. Those flowers, newborn animals, and changes in weather mean more pollen and dander, which only makes for more sneezing, nasal congestion, and irritated eyes. If you suffer from allergies, fear not. There are plenty of things you can do around the house to keep allergens from makings your spring a nightmare.
A good ventilation system pumps clean air into your home while pumping stale indoor air out. However, a malfunctioning ventilation system can just blow around the dust already in your home or fill your home with pollen from the outdoors.
An easy solution is to replace your air filter. Air filters are designed to clean the air of irritants and allergens, making sure that what you breathe in doesn’t make you sneeze. The average air filter should be replaced about once every two to three months.
The best thing you can do for your HVAC system is to get it professionally inspected and maintained. Your ventilation system should be maintained at least once a year, which will not only keep the sniffles away, but also ensure your system’s longevity.
As tempting as it might be to let in that wonderful spring air, you’re also letting in the pollen, dander, and other allergens that will set off your sneezes. As long as you’ve replaced the air filter, your air conditioner will do an excellent job of keeping your home comfortably cool. Only use fans after you follow the next step.
Dust accumulating on air vents, windowsills, blinds, and other hard, flat surfaces will exacerbate your outdoor allergies when you get back inside. Give your home a good sweeping and vacuuming. Check curtains and drapes as well. If allergies are really bad, cover your mouth and nose with a handkerchief and eyes with protective glasses.
Make this a seasonal habit. Use your vacuum to suck up any dust on your mattress. Sprinkle on some baking soda, wait about 15 minutes, and vacuum again. This will not only eliminate pollen and allergens, but also eliminate odors that have built up in the fabric.
Allergen debris tends to collect on pillows. Considering you press your face onto them for hours every night, that’s a big problem. Vacuum foam pillows. Down and fiberfill pillows can be thrown in the laundry (but make sure you check the labels).
Spring cleaning and keeping an eye on the pollen forecast are the best ways to keep your home allergy free. Stay healthy!
The weather is heating up, which means you air conditioner is bound to get much more of a workout, which can easily cause ducts to get a little moist. Combine that with spring’s characteristic humidity and you have the perfect recipe for mold growth.
Mold presents significant health problems and can make your spring allergies feel even worse than usual, so let’s take a look at how you can keep mold from building up in your air ducts.
Mold loves moist, dark areas, and the hot outdoor temperature can cause your cooler ducts to sweat, forming condensation inside and out. To keep moisture to a minimum, insulate your ducts and cooling coils. Wrapping a duct in insulating material keeps its surface warm, preventing the temperature differential that leads to sweating. Surround the insulation in a vapor barrier to prevent moisture from getting into the insulation itself.
Run a dehumidifier in your home. If your home experiences excessively humid conditions, consider a whole-house dehumidification system. Many times these can be added on to an existing system.
UV light from the sun it the best natural killer of mold. The inside of your system is dark and moist near your coil and at the beginning of your duct system. With a stand alone UV light installed inside your coil or supply-air plenum you can bring the sunlight right inside your system, keeping it mold free!
If you have a lot of mold in your system already, a UV light won’t get rid of it. First you’ll need to have your system professionally sprayed, scrubbed and disinfected, then install the UV light to kill mold spores before they land on any surface.
Most filters in the average home are very poor and only catch the big stuff. Mold spores are tiny, measured as small as 3.0 microns! To put that in perspective, visible dust is as small as 10 microns. Only a MERV 10-16 Rated Filter can even think of stopping mold spores that small.
If your like the rest of us, things that are out of sight are out of mind. Our air conditioning system can get neglected because it’s in our attic or on the side of our house. The best way to keep your system running in top condition and mold free is think about getting a regularly scheduled maintenance from a professional HVAC contractor that you trust. Here are some of the benefits:
Preventing mold or getting rid of it will always require a combination of methods working together, cleaning, filtering, UV lighting surfaces, and maintaining your system regularly. Don’t forget, it’s important for your health and your systems longevity.
The way we consume things shifts over a given period of time and the way we consume air conditioning and use energy has changed over the past 20 years. What has lead to this change? We examine the factors that have shifted our consumption of a/c in our latest infographic:
Even with summer coming to a gradual close, air conditioning is still an important part of keeping your home comfortable throughout the year. According to the American census, 65.9 percent of homes had some form of central air conditioning in 2011.
One of the more recent improvements to the modern air conditioning system is ductless air conditioning. The popularity of this new system is growing and it’s easy to see how ductless may replace traditional air conditioning. Let’s take a closer look at ductless air conditioning.
Before we go further, let’s take a step back and look at the science that goes into air conditioners. Air conditioning takes advantage of one very basic law of physics. When a liquid turns into a gas—a process known as evaporation—it absorbs heat. You can feel this when you wipe some cold water on your arm. It feels cool because of evaporation. Air conditioners essentially force chemical refrigerants to turn from liquid to gas and back again over and over through a system of closed coils.
The refrigerant moves through a series of indoor and outdoor coils. When hot air flows over the indoor coils, they absorb the heat and collect the humidity from your home. The heat travels thru pipes to the outdoor coils where the fan on the a/c unit pulls cooler air across the coils and takes the heat away, as the refrigerant cools it returns to a liquid again and travels back inside the home to pick up more heat. Fortunately, refrigerants are designed to change their molecular state (liquid to gas to liquid again) at fairly low temperatures. The compressor, like our heart, continually pumps the refrigerant through this process, which efficiently removes heat from your home and exchanges it outside.
Traditional central air conditioning is a split system consisting of an indoor coil usually installed above the furnace and a compressor unit located somewhere outside the home. When you turn your air conditioner on, the compressor springs to life and pumps the chemical refrigerant into the system inside the house, supplying you with all that chill air, which travels through ducts to cool your entire home. As the indoor unit transfers the heat into the refrigerant, it travels to the compressor and coils outside, which release the heat into the air.
For apartments and smaller homes, you may have a window unit. Unlike central air systems, window units combine the coils and the compressor into the single unit, but they work in the same general way. Heat is removed from your home and transferred through the compressor and radiates from the coils into the outside air—the part sticking out of the window.
Ductless air conditioning still uses the same basic methods as a traditional system—evaporation, compression, and condensation. Ductless systems are also split with the compressor outside and the cooling parts inside. The big difference is, unsurprisingly, the lack of ducts.
No ducts means no air conditioning vents, so how is heat removed out of the home? Indoor air-handling units, called heads or cassettes, make this happen right within the room itself. The heads are linked by a refrigerant line that connects them to the compressor outside.
Ductless systems provide a lot of advantages over the traditional system. The system is zonal, which means you can place heads in different rooms to create several zones with different temperatures. In other words, you can make a completely comfortable home that adjusts to your own needs. For example, you could keep your bedroom a cool 67 degrees while keeping your kitchen a comfortable 75 degrees. Alternately, you can turn on heads in sunny parts of the house and leave those in shaded areas off saving you money.
Ductless systems also present a ton in savings. Installation can be easier and cost effective as you don’t have to worry about installing a whole network of ducts into your home. It’s a matter of mounting the indoor units, making a few electrical connections and hooking up the refrigerant lines to the outdoor unit. Ductless air conditioning is also more efficient than traditional systems. Much of that is attributed to the lack of ducts, which are prone to leaks of up to 35% in the average home and can gain heat from the attic. Ductless heads remove heat and provide cool air directly in the room itself instead of sending air all the way to a central location of the home to be cooled and back again.
If you’re considering installing ductless air conditioning in your home, contact a professional ductless air conditioning specialist like Bob Jenson A/C today to learn which system can work for your home and comforts needs.
We’re so used to having cool air at the push of a button we may forget there was a time when that wasn’t a reality. It’s fun to know where things came from and how we got where we are today. So while your enjoying your perfectly cooled office or home, check out “The History of Air Conditioning” infographic we’ve come up with, for a little nod to those who’ve made it possible.
We tend to take our utility power for granted until it goes out and then we realize how much electricity is involved in our daily lives. What we can’t stand is getting those hugh bills and realizing we are overpaying the utility company with are hard earned dollars. We breakdown the utility bill and reveal where you might be able to save your cash to spend on what you want!
Obviously your heating and cooling system can dominate your yearly power expenses. Updating these power hungry machines can save you hundreds of dollars and start to pay off the investment. If your not ready for that kind of cost, you might look into insulating your attic to lower the time your system has to run during the year. We give free estimates on both, so call us or contact us today and we’ll help you reduce those utility bills while increasing your comfort.
Weeds, vines and bushes surrounding your air conditioner will choke off airflow to the outdoor coils and directly effect your indoor cooling and efficiency. Take a minute and trim back any of this growth a couple of feet around the sides of the unit and clear the unit itself of hitchhiking vines.
Setting things on or around your A/C may seem convenient at the time but it can increase your energy bills and overheat your A/C unit. Clear out the stuff and let your a/c breath again. And never cover your air conditioner with plastic, it’s meant to be outdoors!
We love pets as much as you do but these furry friends tend to shed a lot before or during summer. Because your air conditioner is pulling air in thru it’s sides and out off the top, all that hair clogs up the coils pretty quickly and kills performance. Clean the hair of the sides of the unit and think about moving outdoor pets to another part of the yard or block their access right up next to the unit.
Dryer Lint is so damaging to A/C units that the California building code says not place a/c units anywhere near them. Dryer lint will fully clog up your a/c coils and will continue to decrease cooling, and strain the compressor to the point of it seizing up. If you have an existing dryer vent nearby, put a filter on the end to capture the lint. Even an old pair of nylons are better than nothing. Make sure to clean the lint of the sides of the unit and spray it down with a garden hose if needed. This can save you thousands of dollars in replacement costs down the road.
While you may not have a choice in the matter, if you are placing a new unit, choosing a shady location over a sunny one can increase the lifespan and efficiency of any unit.
If you have difficulty with any of these tasks or you realize it’s a bigger project than you thought, we are always here to help you get your unit back to performing it’s best. Feel free to call or contact Bob Jenson A/C and learn more about our maintenance plans.
Summer is heating up, and as the sun beats down on the cracked concrete, your home slowly but surely turns from comfortable hovel to sweltering sauna. Fortunately, instead of melting into a puddle, you have a wide range of cooling systems to choose from. The real trick is figuring out what’s right for you. Let’s take a look at the different home cooling systems at your disposal.
Simply turn your ceiling fan on in a forward—often counter-clockwise—motion and you’re greeted with cool air. The spinning blades force air down. The downward movement of air improves circulation in the room and creates a wind chill effect, similar to opening your car window or blowing on some hot soup. The effect makes you feel cooler and accelerates your sweat’s rate of evaporation.
However, ceiling fans aren’t the best cooling option. Although ceiling fans improve circulation and cool your skin, they don’t actually lower the temperature in your room, and they don’t reduce humidity. Running a ceiling fan when no one is around wastes electricity and causes a mild rise in temperature from the fan’s motors. Furthermore, not many homes these days come with ceiling fans, stylish as they may be. It’s not worth the trouble to install a ceiling fan for such minimal gain.
The cheap and easy solution, portable fans certainly get the job done in milder temperatures. Much like a ceiling fan, portable fans improve circulation and create a wind chill. The great thing about portable fans is their mobility, so you can be more strategic with the placement of your fans. For example, place one fan at your open door and another pointing out a window across your home to get a breeze moving through your home.
Once you get into hotter temperatures, a single fan isn’t much help. They don’t have the size or power of ceiling fans and aren’t as good at cooling as more robust systems.
Evaporative coolers, or swamp coolers, are technically air conditioners in that they condition air via cooling, but where your average A/C unit cools air using metal coils, a swamp cooler works through evaporation of water. Air passes through a series of damp pads in an evaporative cooler. The water on these damp pads evaporates into the air, which is then pumped into your home, pushing warm air away.
As effective as they are, evaporative coolers do have their downsides. Operating via evaporation means putting water into the air. While that’s fine if you live in a dry climate, more humidity in any other climate will make you feel miserable. Although evaporative coolers generally use less energy than your average air conditioner, they require a regular supply of water. Water conservation is just as pervasive an issue as electricity use.
The air conditioner is the crème de la crème of home cooling systems, the greatest respite for boiling, sweaty days. An estimated two-thirds of homes in the United States have air conditioners.
Air conditioning systems work by transferring heat from your home’s interiors to its surrounding environment while pumping cool air into the home. Air is cooled as it passes over an evaporator, a series of metal coils filled with refrigerant, while hot air is released outside via a condenser.
Air conditioners appear in several varying types, including:
Air conditioning systems offer optimal cooling and climate control. They keep you and your home cool and take some of the humidity out of the air. The main concern with air conditioning is energy efficiency, but improvements in technology have led to more efficient, eco-friendly units. Air conditioners are an all-around great solution for staying cool, and with the variety of different systems and retrofits, you shouldn’t have trouble finding a unit that works for your personal budget and lifestyle.
Air conditioners come out on top, but if you have any questions about cooling systems, don’t hesitate to call or contact Bob Jenson A/C for more information.
Is your A/C still running or is it barely walking at this point? Your air conditioning system is the single largest appliance in your home and uses around 40% of your annual energy consumption in the home. If your still trying to get thru summer with an air conditioner that’s over 10 years old you may want to consider a few reasons why upgrading might not be such a bad idea:
First get at least 3 estimates from reputable contractors you trust. Never pay for an estimate, a quality contractor will offer a in-home consultation for free with no obligation to buy. Then while most hvac contractors should be experienced enough to give you a few options based on the needs of home and your family beware of someone pushing just one expensive system and not explaining why. Ask your trusted contractor about efficiency rebates, factory equipment rebates and tax credits. You can even see if the contractor is running specials on Yelp or Angie’s List if your a member. All of these can add up to a few thousand dollars in savings. Systems can still be costly and so don’t forget to ask about current financing offers that may work for you.
Upgrading your old air conditioning system can be a great decision especially when it will result in increased comfort, flexiblity and energy savings for the next decade! If and when you’d like to get more information call or contact Bob Jenson A/C and we’ll set up a free visit at your convenience.