Save energy save money. An improperly sized AC unit can be a real energy waster, so what size should my AC be? So lets look at sizing air conditioning systems.

My air conditioning was working, but I feared that something was wrong. As the heat has become relentless in Houston these past few weeks, I noticed that the system was struggling to keep up. It was constantly on. I knew that my electricity bill was going to be high; my wife was concerned about my daughter’s birthday party. Would our guests be comfortable? What size was my ac unit, and did I know how to size my air conditioning?

I knew that my ac was sized properly for the house, so I thought that maybe the refrigerant had a problem. HVAC units come sized to provide so many tons of air conditioned air. They are either at the ton mark or a half ton mark. For example, many smaller homes may have a 3 ton unit or a 3 and a half ton unit. You will not have a 3.75 ton unit. To determine the number of tons in principle is fairly basic formula: square footage of the home divided by 500 equals the tons needed for your system. That is how to size an air conditioning unit. However, let us take a 1700 sq ft home; this gives us the result of 3.4. The next step is where HVAC service people may disagree. Our result is close to 3.5, so most installers would go with a 3.5 ton unit. There is an argument against this though. A few installers may tell you that a unit has to be undersized by a bit to function well, so they would suggest a 3 ton unit. There is a case to be made for this statement, but my HVAC technician who came out this weekend made quite a different argument that I wish to share.

Hubert is a great guy, and I trust him to always have my back when it comes to working on my air conditioning. His client base is small, because he does the HVAC work as a side line business, but he did receive training and is qualified. He checked my system out, and he said that it was working fine for what it was. He then suggested his course of action. He said that because the heat has been so bad lately, the unit just could not keep up. First, it may need cleaning. The coils on the compressor and evaporator coil should be cleaned every so often. I rinse them down with water, but he said that using an acid solution may be in order to really clean the coils. Then he mentioned the size of the unit. His thoughts about size is that ac units should be a bit larger, because during a heat emergency like what we are facing now, the air conditioning systems just cannot keep up. In our 1700 sq ft example, he would go with a 4 ton unit. The smaller units would run all day, and they would never be able to cool the house below 80F. This was actually what I was experiencing. By having a larger unit, you may use more electricity while it was in use, but you would not use more than the smaller units, because once it did its job, it would shut down, while the other units continued to run all day long. This running constantly was happening to me too. He was making sense.

I am going to start with the acid cleaning to see where that gets me. I wanted to share this story with you, because I know that you may be facing a similar situation. We home inspectors will frequently comment on our reports about the size of the HVAC system. Typically, we fall into the same categories as the installers: most of us would go with the 3.5; and a few of us would say the 3 ton unit (which is where I have always fallen). However, if an ac technician is suggesting a larger unit (the 4 ton in our example), there may be a case that he is right, given our climate. I am going to check into this some more.

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2. Steps to Inspecting an Air Conditioning System A simplified way to inspect your air conditioning system without...
3. Improving the Energy Efficiency of Your Air Conditioning System Do you need to improve the energy efficiency for an...
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Tags: AC, air conditioning, high electric bills, proper sizing, Wasting energy
This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 at 4:46 am and is filed under Home Maintenance-Consumer Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.