Your Contractor Will Tailor Your New A/C To Your Home’s Specific Requirements — Here’s How
How much air conditioning does your Florida home need?
The answer may not be as easy to come by as you might think. Although some people — even some HVAC contractors — try to use simple rules of thumb based on the size of the house, such a method essentially amounts to guesswork. If you are lucky, such guessing might provide the right answer. Just as often, though, it will leave you with an A/C system that is ill-equipped to keep you comfortable.
Instead of guessing at your air conditioning requirements, your contractor should figure out exactly what you need by calculating your home’s heat gain. Heat gain is, well, heat that your home gains. Heat gain can come from the outside air temperature, through air leaks or inefficiencies in your home’s insulation. It can come from sunlight shining through your windows, creating the greenhouse effect. It can even come from your own body heat, or from the waste heat given off by appliances such as your refrigerator and clothes dryer.
It is this heat gain, not your home’s size, that determines how much A/C you need. Your air conditioner needs to produce as many BTUs of cooling power each hour as your home gains in heat on the hottest summer afternoon. (Each ton of A/C capacity is equal to 12,000 BTUs, or British Thermal Units, per hour.) If your A/C is too small for the amount of heat gain, your home will not stay cool; too large, and you will likely run into efficiency and humidity problems.
Besides determining the size of the A/C unit, your contractor can ensure that all parts of your house stay cool by accounting for differences in the heat gain for individual rooms. Or they might install a zoning system so that every part of the house gets exactly the amount of air conditioning needed.
At Symbiont Service Corp. of Englewood, we will work to tailor your new cooling system to your home’s specific requirements, ensuring that you end up with an efficient system that will keep you comfortable. Contact us todaywith any questions you may have.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information, click here to download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Symbiont Service Corp. serves Englewood, Florida and the surrounding areas. To get started, check out our website.
Stay In The Loop
Don't miss out! Like us on Facebook or subscribe to our RSS Feed on Feed Burner and get our latest posts.
