Category: Heating

Air Conditioning: What’s it about?

AC Truth3 Comments

It’s all about “AIR!”

First, your home’s air conditioning system must be sized correctly to provide the proper CFM of air and BTUs of cooling to each room of your home.

What is CFM?
CFM (Cubic Feet per Minute) is a measure of volume of airflow rate. Visualize a basketball. A basketball is approximately 1 cubic foot in volume.

How many CFM’s does your system require?
For example, a typical 3 ton system (36,000 BTUs) requires a minimum of 1,050 CFM to a maximum of 1,200 CFM to perform to manufacturer’s specifications.

What are BTUs?
(British thermal unit) – 1 BTU is equal to the heat produced by burning a single wooden match or can be defined as the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 pound of water by 1°F.

Once you have the proper airflow, you can cool it, heat it, dehumidify it and clean it, to provide you and your family with total personal comfort.

Bedroom airflow issues
How to know if it is a lack of supply air or lack of return air:

FIRST: Does the room cool fine during the day with the entrance door open?

SECOND: Is your problem only when the door is closed for privacy issues?

THIRD: If the room cools satisfactorily and only has issues when the door is closed, add a properly sized return air grill with duct work ran back to the air handler plenum.

FOURTH: If cooling is not adequate with door open, increase airflow supply, enlarge supply duct or add additional supply register with accompanying duct work coming from supply air plenum, plus add a return grill with accompanying duct work ran back to return plenum for good performance.

NOTE: The new building code requires all major rooms to have properly sized return air grills to allow free flow of return air back to air handler.

Heating

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There are two main and popular methods of providing you with heating comfort during our heating season. Southwest Florida’s heating season has varied degrees of need. Some seasons are quite short while other seasons can be long and expensive.

The most prevalent method is strip heat, which is incorporated in the indoor unit (air handler) portion of your air conditioning system. This will do the job over most heating seasons, but it can be quite costly to operate if the season is cooler or longer than normal, also some owners are not physically comfortable due to the drying effect from the strip heat on their skin.

For the most comfort on your body and your pocket book is a heat pump system or, also referred to as a reverse-cycle system. This is the process  for your system to provide cooling in the summer and heating in the winter. Initial cost is more but you will save the money back through power bill savings. Fact is, a heat pump is approximately four times more efficient than electric strip heat.