How Our Air Conditioning Service Can Help You Cool Your Whole House Better | Irving, TX
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Looking back at this summer, was your home all at the perfect temperature? Or did you have some rooms or even parts of rooms where you need a sweater, while other places in the same house you’re sweating? Balancing the effects of your air conditioning system so you’re comfortable throughout your home is one of our air conditioning service’s talents. At an One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating of Dallas, we can help even out the temperatures in your Irving, TX home, even when the situation has many contributing factors that need attention.
Having our air conditioning service check out your home’s uneven cooling can actually lead to important adjustments and repairs to your home’s system, some as simple as air filter replacement but essential for the long life and best operation of your air conditioning system. Our air conditioning service in Irving, TX can also discuss repairs and upgrades to your system that can significantly improve your home’s comfort and temperature balance, as well as give you more control over how your system uses energy throughout the day. It pays to work with our knowledgeable air conditioning service to get the most out of your home’s HVAC system. Also, it allows you to take care of needed maintenance, repairs, and upgrades.
Why Your Comfort Concerns Can Reflect Important Problems with Your Air Conditioning
Cold blasts by your living room couch or warm areas of your bedroom can be annoying, uncomfortable or even lead to health issues as your body adapts to the temperature and humidity of one part of your home or another. As our air conditioning service has seen in many homes, the lack of balanced, consistent temperatures in a home with air conditioning can be the result of many factors, and it does take considerable training to recognize and locate them. Some may be the result of operational problems with the air conditioning unit, while others may be issues in your ducts hidden away in the attic. There can even be airflow issues from small regulating doors called dampers that are hidden inside the ducts, which our air conditioning service can check. When your cooling unit gets older or is not specified correctly for your home’s needs, you can also get problems with balance that are the result of too much or too little air conditioning power. Other, simpler problems can also contribute to imbalance, including blocked airflow from your vents or even an air filter that’s been in service too long as looks like it’s matted with fur from the dust, and perhaps pet fur, from your home, and our air conditioning service can tell you how often to replace it, and show you how. Airflow problems can lead to other issues besides comfort concerns, including increased allergies and air quality problems from poor circulation, and mold, dust, or debris from heavily recirculated air and dirty ducts. Over or underpowered AC units can result in wear and tear and energy inefficiency from inappropriate cooling cycling patterns.
Checking Your Air Vents
You can start the hunt for contributing factors that are causing your airflow problems even before our air conditioning service arrives, by checking your vents for blockages. It’s not uncommon for chairs and even sofas to be placed over AC vents when they’re moved for cleaning or gatherings, resulting in cool air blasted at the bottom of furniture instead of circulating in the room. Return vents should also be clear and clean for air intake, and vents in the ceiling shouldn’t be obstructed by bookshelves and hutches below. People will occasionally close vents on purpose because they aren’t comfortable, but that makes things worse for the house as a whole since it changes the pressure in the system and causes further imbalance. If it’s necessary to close vents, our air conditioning service can recommend other, more productive solutions that won’t disrupt the system. Vent placement can also be an issue, as the original system design may not reflect your current spaces after renovation or other changes. Aiming vents can affect air circulation, and cleanliness or blockage from materials falling into the vent can be a problem as well.
Your AC Ducts and Their Condition Are Critical Factors for Good Air Circulation
Duct problems can result in feeble or unbalanced air circulation due to leaks, long duct runs, a lack of insulation on ducts run in warm spaces such as attics, and routing problems. Our Irving, TX air conditioning service can inspect your ducts for proper routing, and help with designs for remodeling to make sure the ducts don’t have kinks, excessive bends, and even loops that can affect airflow. These have secondary effects on airflow as they can encourage airborne material to settle in the ducts where airflow is constricted or redirected. Our air conditioning service’s whole house duct cleaning service helps clear ducts that can, over time, become much narrower due to material accumulating inside. This material can also break free and circulate, triggering allergies and respiratory problems as well as leaving more dust on surfaces. Dust accumulation, as well as circulation issues, are worsened by leaks in the ducts, which should be sealed for best air pressure. Our air conditioning service can check your ducts for leaks, disconnection, and proper airflow using special instruments, and seal leaks or replace damaged and dented duct material. Inside some ducts are also booster fans and small regulating doors called dampers, which our team can check as well. If the damper doors loosen and close, they can significantly affect your airflow.
Zoning
Many Irving, TX homeowners are investing in an AC duct upgrade called a zoned system, where our air conditioning service team divides your airflow into multiple duct systems. If your home has a single thermostat for your AC, that thermostat is setting the temperature standard for your entire indoor space. Airflow problems aren’t the only factor that can make that single setting inappropriate for the whole house, as each room has different qualities such as the number of windows, insulation above the ceiling, and perhaps even the number of people gathered or heat from cooking. Having our air conditioning service install zoned systems can help balance your system’s cooling efforts by having each zone work independently to reach the target temperature you’ve chosen for your home. You can also save energy by setting some zones to higher temperatures when they’re unoccupied and don’t need cooling. As our air conditioning service about smart thermostats, intelligent thermostats, and basic timer-based ones that can provide ways to manage the zones automatically, and smart home systems including window shade controllers and room occupancy sensors can add technological sophistication to zone temperature management.
Why Does Your Air Conditioning Service Always Ask About the Air Filter?
As a homeowner, you may have found that air conditioning service technicians are always asking when you last changed the air filter. It’s important that a fresh, correctly sized air filter with the right filter material is in place for your AC system to operate correctly. A dirty air filter will affect your air circulation, and that can even cause damage to your AC system which has to work extra hard to blow air around your home when it’s difficult to draw air through the filter. An unexpected side effect of air filter problems is icing on your evaporator coils, where a steady flow of warm air to be cooled is essential to avoid condensation on the coils turning to ice and blocking airflow entirely. If you’re having serious cooling problems, our air conditioning service technicians will probably check for this common problem, which they can address and also change your air filter at the same time to avoid further occurrences. The air filter on your HVAC system is usually designed for easy replacement by the homeowner on a specified schedule such as monthly.
How Do Underpowered or Overpowered Cooling Systems Affect Comfort — and Much More?
If your home has an AC system that has too much capacity for your home in its current configuration, or even too little capacity, you can wind up with comfort problems because of the way air conditioning systems work. When the thermostat is set, your air conditioning equipment runs and circulates cool air to make your home more comfortable. If the system is too powerful, it will run, blast cold air until the thermostat thinks the area is cool enough, and then shut off, called short cycling. This can result in a severe imbalance in temperatures around your home, overcooling in some areas and undercooling in others, as the system is designed to flow cool air throughout over time and it won’t have a chance to before the thermostat ends the cycle. Weak systems, on the other hand, will operate longer than should be necessary, trying to cool your home but without the capacity to do so. Wear and tear on your AC unit and air handling equipment will be one result, and poorer air quality as any material that has settled in the ducts gets circulated much more than it would under normal circumstances. Your energy bill will suffer as well.
A Reason to Upgrade Your Old AC System
Your older AC system can create a similar situation to the unit with insufficient capacity, shortening its life even further as it runs excessively trying to meet your thermostat setting. Our experts can check your condenser, evaporator, and connections with your HVAC system to see if your older system is in need of repair, but as time passes there are many reasons to consider a replacement of units over ten years old. Newer units offer features such as multi-speed compressors that help them adapt to your home’s cooling needs, addressing the over or under capacity issue by being more flexible themselves and energy efficient, too.
Maintenance
Regular maintenance of your AC system goes a long way towards keeping it reliable and efficient and making sure that it does all it can to keep your home’s temperature balanced. Our team services your AC system from outdoors to indoors, cleaning coils that are used for cooling your home so they’re more efficient and avoid damage, making sure the unit itself is clean and electrical components have reliable connections, and addressing any concerns about refrigerant that would definitely affect your cooling, and would also have potential to damage the compressor at the heart of the system. Cleaning for hygiene is also important, from air filter replacement to condensate path cleaning that helps avoid mold growth and puddles on your basement floor or in your attic from overflow.
Thermostat and Fan Settings
Just as an overpowered cooling unit can result in short-cycling that doesn’t cool the more distant areas of your home, you can accidentally cause short cycling by using the “auto” setting on your thermostat. This setting turns off the fan when the cooling stops, so the air doesn’t circulate enough to reach all the corners of some homes. Setting the fan to the manual, or asking our HVAC specialists about other options that may be present, can help your system get the most mileage out of your energy use, though the fan itself does of course use some energy.
Managing Heat and Cooling through Insulation and Window Shades
You can help your home’s AC system by insulating your attic to keep cool air in and heat out and using window shades or other techniques to decrease solar heating of your home.
Your Comprehensive Air Conditioning Service in Irving, TX
We’re One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating of Dallas, serving homeowners in Irving, TX with expert air conditioning system repair and maintenance, as well as experienced troubleshooting to make sure your system is doing its best for you and your family. We’re also your best resource for modifications to your HVAC system such as duct zoning, system add-ons like HEPA filters and dehumidifiers, and complete system upgrades to the latest energy efficient equipment. Give us a call and enjoy air conditioning the way you expect it to be.