There’s a fairly common misconception when it comes to air filters—at least, air filters that come standard with air conditioners and forced-air heaters. Homeowners often assume they’re in place to protect their indoor air quality. In reality, they’re there to protect the interior components of the HVAC system from dirt, dust, and other debris that can get inside and damage the components.
In other words, your air conditioner’s air filter is there to keep the actual air conditioner clean, not to keep the air clean. Read on to learn more!
The official start of summer is not very far off. And even though it doesn’t get as stifling hot here as it does in other parts of the country, we do have some intense weeks of warmth to contend with. This means you want to be able to rely on your air conditioner to get you through the season as comfortably, and affordably, as possible. This means ensuring that your system is as efficient as it can be.
If you’ve lived in the Olympia area for even just a year, then you know that it stays pretty consistently cold in our area. Summers tend to be brief, and air conditioning systems don’t get a lot of airtime (pun intended). But when you need your air conditioner, you need one that functions well and isn’t going to cost you an arm and a leg to run, right?
In order to work as they should, residential air conditioners require a number of complex components, including wires, switches, capacitors, and more. When something goes wrong, it means that one of these components is experiencing a problem, and it requires a professional to inspect and figure it out in order to safely make repairs.
The short answer to this is, “yes!”
What you’re about to read below are the 3 steps it takes to complete a successful air conditioner installation. Now, we aren’t sharing these steps to encourage you to install your own air conditioner. In fact, we’d specifically advise against that. After all, residential cooling systems are complex pieces of machinery that require a trained and experienced technician to manage.
If your air conditioner looks anything like the image we’ve shared in this blog post, then yes, we can say with certainty that your home is ready for an air conditioner upgrade! Of course, you’re probably not in this bad of shape. To be honest, sometimes the signs that your home is ready for an AC replacement aren’t visual at all–so you may think you have years left of efficient use, or at least this summer.
It’s never a good sign to hear alarming sounds coming from your air conditioner. Sure, there’s no such thing as a silent air conditioner, but you know the sounds yours makes from day to day. You hear the fans whirring, the compressor starting up and shutting down, your outside unit running, and maybe even your ductwork fluctuating with the temperature and airflow.
If you’ve been following our blog for very long, you may have seen us refer to your thermostat as the “brain” of your HVAC systems. Well, if the thermostat is the brain, the compressor is the heart of your air conditioner! It’s what allows for the movement of refrigerant throughout the rest of the air conditioner to transfer heat from inside your home to the outdoors. When this compressor fails, the air conditioner fails. Sure, the fans might still run, but no cooled air will come in through the vents.
That said, one of the most common questions we get from homeowners about air conditioner is how to use their most efficiently in order to lower their cooling costs. Considering that being warm inside our homes is uncomfortable, it’s only natural that you may wonder this as well.