HVAC Tips for All

Living by the ocean has been a dream of mine for a long time.

I ended up having to travel to and live in a town up in the mountains that is almost always cold and where it snows for half the year.

I could not ignore the career opportunity that led me to this town, but now that I am making a good deal of money and socking away cash, I’m starting to set my sights on the coast. I’m keeping things quiet, but I’m building my resume and hoping that a job will open up in a coastal city in my line of work. I am sick of living in the freezing cold! I never even needed to use a furnace until I moved here. I didn’t even know how to maintain one. Before long, I knew that I would have to call a reliable HVAC company in town to help me out with my furnace. I’ve learned all sorts of things about furnace maintenance, But I wouldn’t mind it at all if I could return to a warm city where I will never have to worry about furnaces again! The only thing that I want to use is air conditioner. There’s barely a point to having an air conditioner where I live at the moment. Summers are cool and mild, and even downright cold sometimes. Some people see this as a plus because they can’t handle any measure of heat, but I have always been the opposite. I’m a sun worshiper and I barely ever get to see it! Sunny coastal town, here I come!

 

home owner solutions

I have always been a warm-blooded creature.

Well, you may think that is a given if I’m human.

However, what I mean is, I worship the sun. I was born on a tropical island, and I am used to warmth, humidity, and at most, a cool island breeze in the evenings. This means that if the temperature dips below the 70s, I become a cold and desperate creature indeed! I barely use my air conditioner, even in the summer. I’ll use the ceiling fans or a box fan to circulate air before I use my A/C. This often does the trick for me. However, even I could not deal with the recent heat wave that hit my town a week ago. Finally, after I’m not even sure how long, I turned on the thermostat and cranked the air conditioner back up. I hadn’t even gotten maintenance on it in a few years! It was able to maintain the 78° that I set on the thermostat, but then I remembered something. I was lucky it was able to do so, because when I checked the air filter it was filthy! I had neglected even the most basic air conditioning maintenance because I barely ever use it. I decided that I would at least replace the air filter. After that, at least I had my air conditioner, and it was functional. I considered whether or not I should call out an HVAC technician to do a check up and a tune-up. Then I checked the weather and saw that there would be only one more day of extreme heat. No HVAC technician visit for me!

smart hvac

We were only three days into the school year, when my daughter came home complaining about the heat in school.

She plopped her backside down onto a chair, dropped her bookbag onto the floor, and looked like the last Rosa summer.

She complained and asked me how long before fall arrives? I laughed and told her that summer wasn’t even over yet, and she had to suck it up. She told me the air-conditioning had already been turned off, and she was sure that they had heat coming up through the air vents already. After shaking my head and laughing, which drew some really dirty looks my way, I assured her the heat was not on yet. After a couple of groans and winds, she told me she knew that, but that is how hot it was in the school. She wanted me to call the superintendent and tell them they had to turn on the air conditioning because it was affecting the health of the children. She held up her hand and told me she didn’t want any stories about how they didn’t have air conditioning in the schools when I went to school. She said she was pampered by the school and home having perfect air conditioning, and I’m not still having it on was affecting her mind and attitude. She was spoiled all right, but it wasn’t because of having air conditioning all the time. She was pampered and spoiled, but only because her daddy gave her everything she wanted, including her own thermostat in her bedroom and a heated bathroom connected to it..

zone controlled hvac

At the first sign of power being offer more than an hour, my husband called a hotel that was within a few miles of home

During the summer we often have pop-up thunderstorms in our area. The heat and humidity combined, and it is the perfect situation for pop-up thunderstorms and/or tornado watches. For two hours, our lights were flickering, and I knew we would eventually lose power. The temperature was in the 90s, and if we lost power, we would have no air conditioning. My husband hadn’t had our generator service earlier this summer, and he was half afraid to use it. At the end of last summer, the generator was sputtering and doing gas out, which was not a good thing. Luckily, we didn’t need to use the generator all last summer. This summer was going to be different. We had already lost power twice, but it came on within an hour and we didn’t really miss the air conditioning unit. If our power when out on this day, it would probably be out the entire night. Not only would we have to go without air conditioning, but my husband’s oxygen and BiPAP would not be working. I was worrying more about him with his oxygen BiPAP, then I was about my asthma and not having air conditioning. At the first sign of power being offer more than an hour, my husband called a hotel that was within a few miles of home. When they told him they only had one vacant room, he told him to save it and we would be there within an hour. We packed up his CPAP and portable oxygen, and headed to the hotel, hoping their air conditioning would continue working.

ductless mini split

I knew the air conditioning unit was outside the kitchen.

• I lived in this house for four years, and I knew exactly where was because whenever I looked out the window I could see the top of the air conditioning unit.

What I didn’t realize until just this past summer, was that I couldn’t open my kitchen window because the AC unit was in the way. We had several really cool weeks during the summer were the air conditioning wasn’t necessary. I thought that I could open up a window in the kitchen and one in the living room, and get a cool breeze blowing to the house, but I thought wrong. The way the air conditioning unit was installed, they had nailed the windows shut. I thought this was kind of strange, and was going to pull the nails up. When I got outside, I realize air conditioning unit was much closer to the window than I had anticipated. Not only was it close to the window, but it was about 3 inches higher than the windowsill. I called the HVAC company, and asked there would be a problem if I open the window? They send an HVAC technician out to the house to inspect the situation. His first question was why did we have the air conditioning unit put directly under the window? I told him it had been there before we even bought this house but this was the first summer when I had considered opening up a window instead of having the AC unit running. He shook his head and told me we were stuck with the AC unit where was.

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