You wouldn’t believe how many homeowners we meet who think their ducts and air conditioners function completely separately. Too many people believe that if their air conditioner is brand new, no matter the shape of their ductwork, they’ll get the cooling they need throughout the summer. This is a completely untenable position.
Your ducts and your air conditioner are kind of like your veins and your heart. Together, they make the circulatory system that’s responsible for transporting blood throughout your body. On their own, they’re just organs and they can hardly function like that. Your air conditioner is the heart of cooling in regards to HVAC in Arlington, VA. Your ductwork is the network of veins that transports the cooled air throughout your home. When you are without one of these two components, your comfort an efficiency both suffer.
Let’s talk about how your ducts or air conditioner are doing.
Keep Your AC in Good Condition
Your air conditioner is responsible for creating the cooled air that your home so desperately needs. If it’s broken down or functioning less efficiently, it’s basically just an oversized fan. You want to make sure you schedule routine maintenance for your AC every year so that it can operate at peak efficiency. If your air conditioner is also coming up on its 10th or 11th birthday, then you might want to consider replacing it. There is no maintenance appointment or targeted repair that can restore efficiency and effectiveness to what it was when you first got it. That’s okay! Air conditioners aren’t meant to last forever and it’s okay to consider replacement.
Keep Your Ducts Together
When your air conditioner creates the cooled air that your home needs, where does it go? It doesn’t just go directly from your air conditioner’s coils to your rooms, it needs to be transported there through air ducts. Your ducts are the key tool in bringing cooled and conditioned air throughout your home. The same goes for heated air that is created by your furnace in the winter!
Any time that air goes through an area of your air ducts with rips, gaps, tears, or other sort of problems, it will leak out and go somewhere you won’t be able to notice it. Cooled air can leak into your attic, crawlspace, basement, or many other areas depending on how large your home is. This represents a fundamental problem with ducts that are neglected—you’re actively neglecting your air conditioner at the same time. If you don’t repair your air ducts, you risk dealing with up to 30% of conditioned air leaking to places you won’t feel it.
Let Them Work Together
When the air in your air ducts leaks out, it won’t register on your thermostat that your AC is cooling your home properly. This means your air conditioner will get the signal that it needs to consume more energy and work harder to cool your home. Ultimately, your AC is going to pump more cooled air into your ducts because almost half of that air is leaking out!
Treat these systems as they should be treated, like a team. Repair your ducts and take care of your air conditioner today!
The team at Polar Bear Air Conditioning & Heating Inc. has your back. Just give us a call!