4 Facts To Know About Your HVAC System

You may not think much about your home’s heating and cooling system. As long as it’s working, it’s doing its job, and you have nothing to worry about, right? Well, that isn’t always the case. As with any major appliance in your home, your HVAC system requires a lot of attention to keep it working well. If you want to take better care of your HVAC system, check out these four facts you should know.

1. The Temperature Outside Matters

The temperature outside your house strongly influences the heat inside your home. Thanks to heat gain, natural heat from the sun can seep in through windows, and hot air can sneak through small holes, making your home too hot. To cool the home, you turn on your central air conditioning unit, but these are only designed to lower the temperature to 20 degrees less than the temperature outside.

Therefore, if it is 100 degrees outside, you’ll need the air conditioner set to 80. If you try to set it lower, it can cool the house further, but this also strains the system, causing it to break down sooner than it should. For this reason, besides relying solely on your HVAC system, you need back up plans like thick curtains to block sunlight and heat.

2. Duct-Systems Are Effective but Not Always Efficient

Forced-air heating and cooling solutions are highly desirable for their effectiveness. With forced air, you can quickly heat or cool your home, but if you don’t maintain the system, it becomes extremely inefficient. The biggest reason a duct system becomes inefficient is because of the ducts, which deliver the heated or cooled air throughout the home.

Ducts can get dirty and damaged. When this happens, heated/cooled air can escape before it reaches you. Also,as the ducts get smaller from debris, less air reaches you, putting more stress on the system. As long as you take good care of the system and ducts, it should stay efficient, but many forced-air systems don’t provide even heating, creating drafts.

3. Some Systems Support Zoned Heating

Regardless of which type of heating and cooling solution you choose, you may be able to consider zoned heating and cooling. While you can get a forced-air system with this feature, one of the easiest ways to incorporate zoned heating in your home is with a mini-split system. With this type of HVAC system, each room has its own heating/cooling device.

This allows you to turn off heating/cooling to certain rooms without straining the system. Mini-split systems also don’t use ducts, so they are a cheap option if your home doesn’t already have ductwork. All the indoor units are connected to one outdoor unit as with a traditional air conditioning system.

4. Poorly Maintained Systems Can Be Dangerous

A poorly maintained system can create many problems. At the very least, unclean ducts can blow allergens, animal feces, bacteria, viruses, etc. into the breathing air. Depending on your overall health, this can lead to major breathing problems or mild irritation to skin, eyes, and lungs. The most dangerous risk of not maintaining your HVAC system is carbon monoxide. This odorless and colorless gas can escape into your home if the system becomes damaged. If you don’t have a carbon monoxide detector, you may not know your family is being poisoned until it is too late, leading to illness or even death.

A good HVAC system can heat and cool your home efficiently and effectively. Without regular maintenance and cleaning, however, no HVACs system is in peak performance. If you would like to know more about maintaining your system, if you need repairs, or if you want to talk about replacing your existing HVAC system, contact us at Colorado Discount Heating & Cooling today.