With hot summer weather, now is the time to give your home a “check-up.” Here are six tips to make sure your air conditioning bills don’t blow your cool!

1. Have your duct system tested for air leaks. Many assume that windows and doors are the major cause of a home’s energy wasting air leaks. But according to recent research by the Department of Energy (DOE), gaps, joints and disconnections in the typical home’s duct system are much more significant. The DOE states that the typical duct system loses 25 to 40 percent of the energy put out by the central heat pump or air conditioner. Authorities recommend having an AC contractor test for leaks and then seal them with a brushed on fiber-reinforced elastomeric sealant. Duct tape usually dries out and fails. It turns out duct tape is great for many things, but sealing ducts isn’t one of them!

2. Ask your AC contractor to perform an Infiltrometer “blower door” test. The blower door is a computerized instrument originally invented by the Department of Energy. It pinpoints where your home’s worst air leaks are, such as duct leaks, and also measures how leaky the overall house is. Many homes have significant air leaks into the attic: hot dusty air often gets drawn in through recessed can lights and pulled down stairs. New sealing products are available to fix these significant leaks. Many AC contractors offer an Infiltrometer test as part of a “Whole House Health & Comfort Checkup” that also checks insulation levels and overall duct performance.

3. Close your fireplace damper. Did you remember to close it last time you used the fireplace? Shut it now or waste precious cool air all summer long!

4. Replace your air conditioner or heat pump air filter. Most systems need this done every month to ensure safe and efficient operation. Keep forgetting to do it? Ask your AC contractor for information on an extended surface area whole-house air filter that only needs to be replaced once a year. It also does a far better job of keeping your equipment and the air in your home clean.

5. Have your air conditioner cleaned and tuned. A pre-season tune-up is a great investment. It reduces the chances of breakdowns in the middle of summer and more than pays for itself through more energy efficient operation. Make sure the AC contractor cleans both the indoor and outdoor heat transfer coils, and checks refrigerant gas charge by measuring “superheat” or “subcooling.”

6. Consider replacing your old air conditioner or heat pump. Just like a car, central cooling equipment doesn’t last forever. Is your system more than 12 years old? Planning to stay in your home more than a few years? Many authorities recommend replacing it before it fails permanently. A new system improves comfort, is more dependable and creates less air pollution. New units are up to twice as energy efficient, which saves money on your monthly electric bills.

However, government and utility research has found that more than 90 percent of newly installed high efficiency systems have energy wasting mistakes. Do some homework before talking to contractors. For more information, visit www.energystar.gov and www.comfortinstitute.org. Print out the free Comfort Institute reports “Tips and Secrets To Buying A New Heating and Cooling System” and “How To Identify a Good Heating and Cooling Contractor.”

Summary: Air conditioning a home properly will allow your family to be comfortable in the entire house. Central air conditioning systems must be sized correctly. Call a professional heating and air conditioning expert to calculate the proper size air conditioning unit for your house. If you already have a central air conditioning system, he can do the air conditioning troubleshooting for you.

The central air-conditioning system in a home, as well as the heating system, is one of the most important parts of a home outside of a sound roof and indoor plumbing. The heating and air conditioning systems create an artificial climate inside a home. It is a very realistic expectation that this climate can be the same in each room. In my own home, each room, no matter the outdoor temperature or time of day (this is very important), can be within one or two degrees of any other room in my home. That keeps my family and me very comfortable.

It is unrealistic for you to expect your home to be a certain temperature no matter what the outdoor temperature is. In other words, if the outdoor temperature rises to 115 F, I would not expect you to be able to cool your home to a chilly 72 F temperature without considerable discomfort on days when the temperature was say 85 F.

Central air conditioning systems are designed to operate within a given range of temperatures. For example, the design temperatures in your part of the country may be only 20 degrees. This means that your air conditioner can only produce a 20-degree difference in temperature from the actual outdoor temperature to the lowest possible temperature the system can maintain indoors. It is possible to create a wider temperature spread, but oversizing an air conditioning system can result in short cycling when the air conditioner has little work to do.

If an oversized air-conditioning system short cycles or only has to drop the temperature a few degrees, it simply does not run long enough to remove humidity from the air. When this happens, the temperature inside your home gets to the desired level, but you feel cold and clammy. Properly designed central air-conditioning systems will run for ten or fifteen minutes at a time which allows them to extract humidity as the air flows across the cooling coils inside the air handler.

The key to getting an air conditioning system to work properly is to have a real professional size the equipment properly and install a ducting system that delivers the right quantity of air to each room of the house. Each room must also have a return-air duct inlet that vacuums hot air from the ceiling and returns this air to the central system to be cooled once more.

A professional air conditioning person will take your new-home plans and analyze them using sophisticated computer software. This process will determine both the BTU (British Thermal Units) heat gain and heat loss for EACH room of your new home. This same exercise can be done on existing homes. With this data, the professional can ensure the proper sized equipment is purchased, and the ductwork that provides air to each room is sized correctly. This is of the utmost importance.

Heat gain is the measurement of heat your house gains each hour during the summer months. This number can range from 20,000 in a smaller home to more than 90,000 in larger homes. There are many variables including but not limited to: amount of wall and ceiling insulation, number and size of windows facing west and south, amount of air infiltration, compass direction each wall of your home faces, number of people living in the home, etc. Heat loss is the amount of energy your home loses each hour when it is cold outside and you are trying to heat it.

My own home has a heat gain of nearly 77,500 BTUS. To offset this, I have two separate central air-conditioning systems. One is 2.5 tons and the other is a 5-ton system. These two central air-conditioning systems are completely separate from each other. The smaller one handles the second floor of my home which has much less square footage of living space than the first floor of my home.

The advantage of the two systems should be obvious. Each system is controlled by a separate automatic setback thermostat. At night, the thermostat for the first-floor system tells the first floor system to turn off all night since we are upstairs sleeping. In the daytime, the second-floor system is set to not work as hard, since we are downstairs. But one hour before bedtime, the automatic thermostat for the second floor resets itself and tells the outdoor compressor to get to work so the bedrooms are cool when we go upstairs.

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