Archive for January, 2009

Is red clay costing you Green?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
Red Clay

The warm summer months will soon be here and it is time you look at one of the most costly problems you could have affecting your air conditioning system. When I first moved to Georgia in the early 70’s, I could not believe the abundance of the sticky, slippery red clay that is everywhere in our lovely state. It’s hard to clean off your shoes, impossible to get off your white carpet, and slippery as ice. It is also one of the single biggest causes of high cooling bills and inadequate cooling performance in Georgia. The RED CLAY around your air conditioner could be costing you big $GREEN$ by clogging your air conditioner’s coil fins.

An air conditioner cools your home by having air flow through a coil that looks like the radiator on your car. Inside this coil/radiator is a long round tube that freon flows through surrounded by sheets or plates of aluminum. These sheets of aluminum are called fin stock and they pick up the heat rejected from your home in the freon and the airflow across the fin stock transfers the heat to the outside above your air conditioner. When your air conditioner is running the fan pulls air through your coil with a negative pressure. This negative pressure also pulls red clay, dirt, grass clippings, and anything else around your unit up in the fin stock and lodges it tightly in between the round freon tubes and the fins causing the bottom third of your unit’s coil not to transfer heat properly. This clogging will cause your air conditioner to run excessively and will elevate the operating pressure range that is normal for your unit. This in turn will cause premature compressor failure, strain on the electrical starting components of your air conditioner, and will result in high electrical bills and inadequate cooling performance inside your home.

The coils and fin stock of your air conditioner need to be kept very clean and once it is clogged, you cannot simply hose out the dirt and clay because water pressure will just push the debris deeper in the coil. You will need to have a professional licensed contractor apply a acid based coil cleaner that will etch the coil and bubble the dirt and clay out. Then a water bath will leave the coil new and clean and heat transfer will return. When our technicians wash a coil properly, the operating head pressure of a condenser/compressor will drop significantly and cooling temperature drop is restored.

One simple thing you as a homeowner can do is to landscape around your air conditioner unit and cover the ground adjacent to them with small landscaping gravel or rock. A good thick covering of bark will also do the trick. Then make sure you or your landscape company mow the grass away from the unit, not toward it so grass clippings are not sprayed in your air conditioner. These few simple tips will keep you air conditioner running longer at peak efficiency and extend the life of you unit

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Air Conditioning, Saving Money | 2 Comments »

Do I have a leak? (yes) and why can’t you fix it? (read on…)

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

These are two of the most common questions I am asked by homeowners all spring and summer and they are the area of the most confusion and misinformation in the air conditioning business. Every year we get new customers from other companies and we loose customers to other companies because of this one commonly misunderstood areas.

First, let me state unequivocally, that if you ever had to add any Freon to your cooling system, you have a leak. No question about it, period. Final answer. There is no reason you ever have to add Freon to an air conditioning system unless there is a leak. An air conditioning system is a sealed system that if properly installed and maintained, should never leak and never need even a few pounds of Freon added.

I stress this due to the misconception that it is normal to have to “top off” your Freon in your air conditioner. While this has been common practice for years due to the fact it was less expensive to add Freon than it was to find and repair a leak, it is not the case anymore. Freon is in its last years of production and will be taken off the market soon. The quantity of Freon being produced is being curtailed each year and the price is going up. Expect Freon to cost around $60 to $90 a pound this year with the price increasing as we reach the end of the production of air conditioners utilizing it in the end of 2009.

If your cooling system needs Freon every year, it will soon be more expensive to keep adding it than it will be to buy a new system. Every summer I speak to new customers of ours who are unhappy with their old heating and air contractor because they simply ”pumped up” an old leaking air conditioner with out telling them they had a leak. Think of your cooling system as a big car tire, if it goes down, the air had to go somewhere. Freon does not wear out or need to be freshened up or replaced, ever. No matter what you have heard in the past, you have a leak.

“Why can’t you find my leak and fix it”? This is also a very common question I am asked every year and the answer is simple. Normally the leak is not one big leak, but rather many small leaks where the copper tubing is stressed or ruptured by the bonding of a dissimilar metal such as aluminum. These dissimilar metals expand and contract at a different rate and wear a hole in the copper tubing and also react to each other to form corrision and lack of heat transfer. This is why an air conditioner with a same metal coil is more leak proof than a coil with copper tubing  aluminum fins.

Most air conditioning companies have Freon leak detectors to sniff out leaks and with enough time, patience and diagnostic money, they can tell you exactly what you already know. You have a leak! To try and repair these leaks, one would have to melt away the aluminum fins to get to the copper tubing in the middle of the coil and weld up the stress areas. This would render that area of the coil useless and the chance you could repair all the possible leaks and weak areas in a coil are slim to none. Most of the time, these leaking air conditioners are old and inefficient and your money would be better spent simply cutting the cord on them as opposed to throwing good money after bad. What difference does it make where the leak is in that 12 year old machine?

I see person after person spend hundreds of dollars each year finding a leak only to be told it can’t be repaired or worse, fixing one leak only to find they have another the next month after all their Freon has leaked out. Do not get to attached to your old air conditioner as it is just another appliance in your home like your dishwasher or water heater that needs to be updated after 12 to 15 years to assure you are afforded the comfort and energy savings a new system can give you.

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in Air Conditioning | No Comments »

Why can’t I get my home below 80 degrees in the summer?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009
80 degree home

 by DAN JAPE of RELIABLE HEATING & AIR originally published July 2008

In the thirty years I have been repairing air conditioners in the greater Atlanta area, this is one of the most asked questions from frustrated, hot homeowners And the answer is usually lack of tonnage or capacity and lack of proper airflow.

The capacity or tonnage of your air conditioner is the measurement of it’s ability to move heat from inside your home to the outside of your home. Air conditioners are produced from 1.5 ton to 5 ton in half ton increments. A ton of air conditioning is 12,000 Btu’s and a Btu is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of water one degree in one hour or lower it one degree in your cooling system. A Btu is about the same amount of heat generated by burning one stick match. The tonnage of your system is picked by your heating cooling installer using a number of criteria such as sized of your home, insulation in your home, the amount of and type of glass in your home, the roof color, the amount of shade, which way your house faces and a number of other qualifiers that help determine the size needed to overcome the “heat gain” in the summer. The more tons an air conditioner is, the more expensive it is, so many times the builder of your home uses a unit that is not large enough to remove the heat properly in the summer. An air conditioner can’t be sized too large because it will not remove the moisture in your home, but it need to large enough to cycle off and on and maintain your desired temperature. Often when replacing an old cooling system, a slightly larger unit is needed to accomplish this goal. People often spend days researching the SEER rating of an air conditioner and the brand of the units available, and do nothing about what ton cooling unit to purchase. There is nothing more efficient than an air conditioner that is not running. A properly sized air conditioner will cycle off and on all but the hottest days of the year. Then it should be able to maintain a reasonable inside temperature.

Inadequate airflow from your supply vents can be the cause of both poor heating and cooling performance and with the advent of complete ducts system constructed of flex ducting with many twists and turns, many homes today have very little air delivery. Airflow in older homes with all metal ducting was far superior to the modern home of the last 15 years and often times there is very little that can de done about this due to the fact that this flex duct is sealed up behind sheetrock walls and ceilings. Many times it is not cost effective to replace all the ducting in your home with new proper metal ducting or properly installed flex duct. The airflow for your home originates with the furnace blower and it is often a good idea to increase the size of the furnace blower “drive” to help deliver more air to the remote rooms in your home. A variable speed blower furnace will also help deliver the correct amount of air without the need of spending thousands of dollars on duct modifications.

A few small adjustments when replacing your furnace and air conditioner can result in thousands of dollars of energy savings and enhanced comfort for years to come.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Air Conditioning | No Comments »

What the heck is Puron (R410a) anyway?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

by DAN JAPE of RELIABLE HEATING & AIR originally published June 2008.

Freon or Puron? That is the question. Whether is nobler to protect the ozone layer or your pocketbook. Now is the time to consider that change has arrived. As many people are aware, Freon or R-22 is on the way , outlawed by government mandate to be discontinued in home air conditioners by the end of 2009. Starting January 1, 2010, all cooling units produced and sold will no longer be able to use R-22 Freon, the old refrigerant long favored in air conditioning. Starting January, 1 2015, there is a ban on sale and use of all R-22 except for certain uses and by that time the EPA predicts a 90% phase out of R-22. And then on January 1, 2020, all Freon R-22 will be gone except for old, recycled stockpiles of used refrigerant.

This time deadline has seemed like it is far away, but it is now right around the corner and if you buy a new Freon based air conditioner today, you may be in for a surprise tomorrow. Freon is going to shoot up in price, quickly and by the time your new air conditioner is in need of service, it will be more expensive that purchasing a new unit that runs on R410a or Puron, as the new alternative refrigerant is called.

The good news here is that R410a is a far better refrigerant than Freon R-22 ever was. It cools better, dehumidifies better, and is more efficient than R-22. R410a provides a much colder air coming out of your vents, dropping the temperature of the air 25 to 28 degrees each time it passes over your cooling coil. You will also find it does a much better job of removing the humidity in the air, which is half the battle in Metro Atlanta. There are many wonderful things about this new refrigerant, but the most important thing is that this is the only alternative on the market for cooling your home.

Many air conditioning companies have refused to invest in the new equipment needed to service and install this new refrigerant, instead telling the customer nothing about it, or misleading them about the truth on the subject. Just yesterday, I had a potential customer tell me that out of five companies he had bid his new system, two told him nothing about this upcoming phase-out and two told him it was “no big deal” and Freon R-22 would be around for many years and plentiful. The truth is, many of the lower priced air conditioner manufactures have built a lot of R-22 units, thinking the lower price would sell these outdated units and now they have to dump them on an unsuspecting consumer.

The truth about this phase out is just a Google away and no one should ignore it, regardless of what any dealer tells you. The government decided long ago to use a long, gradual phase out of Freon as the smartest way to deal with this issue. Do not wait until the very end to look into it. R410a is only slightly more expensive today and if your heating and air conditioning company does not mention it, or offer it, look elsewhere quickly and do not be mislead. The time is here now to make the change, and in the future, you will very glad you did.

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Air Conditioning | 6 Comments »

Hail damage to your a/c is costly

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

by DAN JAPE of Reliable Heating & Air originally published May 2008

In the past few months, there have been many severe hail storms in and around the Metro Atlanta area and many homeowners have had damage to their air conditioners that is costing them many hundreds of dollars in wasted energy dollars and their insurance companies are misleading them in a effort to reduce their losses.

Your air conditioner remove heat from your home by pulling air through a coil that is very much like the radiator in your car. This coil/radiator has fins made of thin sheets of aluminum bonded to copper tubing and when these fins were struck by hail in the recent storms, they were bent and damaged to the point of reducing and changing the airflow properties of your home’s cooling unit. These fins are critical in the operation and efficiency of your air conditioner and they can’t be repaired. Most of the insurance companies handling these storm damage claims refuse to help the homeowners with these damaged air conditioners due to the fact that it is very expensive to replace these damaged coils.

The outdoor unit and the indoor cooling coils are now a matched set and in 2007 the federal government mandated that all air conditioners be 13 seer or better. This means that insurance companies must spend $2800 to $4000 to bring you back to the point you were before the storm and the fact that the majority of the air conditioners that were damaged were 8 or 10 seer means the homeowner is getting something more efficient than they had before and this is apparently the sticking point with these companies. They don’t seem to mind replacing the roofs or gutters damaged in these storms because they can be repaired with like quality and kind. But the fact that they have to “upgrade” a damaged cooling system has been the source of many problems for homeowners.

Insurance companies have been telling homeowners that this damage is just cosmetic and they can simply comb out the damaged fins with a coil comb and have an air conditioning contractor straighten out the smashed fins. This will never work and will not bring back the cooling efficiency and air flow the unit had prior to the storm. This would be similar to your insurance telling you to beat out the damaged fender in you car with a hammer after a wreck and insisting you be happy with the results.

Except in this case, you will suffer by higher cooling bills and lost cooling capacity for many years to come if these units are not properly repaired and replaced. Do not let your insurance mislead you into not pressing a claim on you air conditioner just due to fact that it still “cools”. If your cooling unit was dented by hail and the fins of your coil were bent, you will never have the same cooling you had before and your insurance company knows this. There is no way to put an exact dollar amount on what it will cost you, but over years of operation, it could be many hundreds of wasted energy dollars. Insist your insurance company treat this damage the same way they are treating your roof, replace it or repair it will a new or like kind product.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Air Conditioning, Care and Maintenance | No Comments »

Please TURN IT OFF before you DESTROY it!

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

This time of year we are besieged with desperate phone calls from homeowners who have noticed there cooling systems not working properly or frozen up with ice. If this happens to you, turn the unit off immediately. Turn it off as soon as you can get to the thermostat! I know this is a tough request when it is hot outside, but if you continue to run an air conditioner that is not cooling up to par, you are going to do harm to your unit, waste your cooling energy dollars, and ultimately may permanently destroy your cooling system. I know this may seem hard to believe, but a large share of dead units we replace are killed by the owner refusing to turn it off when cooling is diminished. The one thing you can be assured of is, a broken air conditioner will never repair itself, no mater how long you continue to let it run. Never! Ever!

Many times customers will place a service call for no cooling and then continue to run their system thinking it might work a little until we get there to fix it. This is when most damage is done to the unit due to the lack of proper operating conditions. A unit that has frozen will do no cooling at all regardless of what common sense tells you and continued running in this condition will kill a compressor quickly. When you see ice anywhere on the refrigerant line set, you are seeing just the tip of an iceberg. The ice is covering the indoor coil preventing air from passing over the fins and it is five to six inches thick after continued operation. If you do not turn and let it thaw, you will burn out your compressor while wasting your money running a compressor that is not cooling your home. Also, if the unit is not thawed when the repairman arrives, he will not be able to find the problem and repair it properly.

A lot of customers will turn the unit off after it freezes and it will thaw and they turn it back on to find it cools again and they call our office and cancel their service call. This is a bad idea! What ever caused the icing will do it again after prolonged running and you will continue to damage your compressor . If you notice ice on your air conditioner, the first thing you should check is your air filter, as a dirty filter will cause icing and this is one of the most common problems we find. The other causes are a lack of Freon or refrigerant, a dirty indoor coil or a bad indoor fan motor. If any of these conditions are the cause of icing or lack of cooling, you must have a technician repair your unit.

One very simple thing you can do to check you air conditioner is go outside to your outdoor unit and carefully observe a few things. First, look for any ice anywhere on the unit, inside on the compressor or on the lines. Next see if there is hot air blowing out the top of your air conditioner. The hot air blowing out your unit is the heat being removed from your home and if the air is not hot, your unit is not cooling properly. The last thing you can do is located the large rubber covered line coming from your house and connecting to your cooling unit. It should always be cold and sweating water off the copper line inside the rubber insulation. If it is just cool to the touch and not sweating cold, you need service. This simply check and observation could save you thousands of dollars in energy costs and unit repair.

Tags: , , , , , ,
Posted in Air Conditioning, Care and Maintenance | No Comments »

Is your furnace safe to operate?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Is your furnace safe to operate? A few tips…

I visit customers in their homes everyday of the week, and I constantly see furnaces that have been neglected to the point of being unsafe and unfit to heat their homes. I find everything from just poor performance and efficiency to furnaces that are extremely unsafe and life threatening. There are some very simple and easy steps you can take to make sure you family is save and warm this winter.

The first thing you should do is visually inspect the flue system of your furnace and water heater. The flue is the round galvanized pipe that takes the unburned gas products and the carbon monoxide to the outside of the home. It is located on the top of your furnace and the water heater usually ties into the furnace flue. Carefully examine the pipe for holes or rust. Squeeze the round pipe and make sure you do not have rust outs working from the inside out. Make sure the flue is solid and strong. You should not be able to easily crush the pipe with you hand. The flue should be sloping upward at all times and should be attached to both the furnace and water heater.

The next thing you should do is remove the top door to your furnace and with a flashlight, carefully look for rust build-up inside the burners and the heat exchanger. The heat exchanger is the compartment that contains the burning of gas and the burners protrude into the heat exchanger cells. Look for any rusty metal and flakes of rusted particles. Carefully examine the condition of the burners looking for damage. If there is any rust in the heat exchanger or on the burners, it has to be cleaned out. Check the front panel of the furnace for burned paint or hot spots. The front panel should never get hot enough to burn the paint or the finish off the front or the side of the furnace. The cause of this burned paint is a heat exchanger that is not containing the heat of combustion and can be a sign of a furnace that needs service or replacement.

Another simple test you can perform is to have someone turn the furnace on while you observe the burners lighting. They should all light smoothly and evenly without any whooshing sound or booming. Once the burners light, they should all burn blue with a slight yellow tip of the flame. Wait until the fan and the blower start up and watch for movement of the flame and watch for movement of the flame and watch for yellow in the flame. This can be a sign of a leaky heat exchanger or a rusted out exchanger. Turn the power switch off and the blower will stop and watch the flame. If it stops moving and dancing around, this is a problem you should have checked out. Also observe your pilot light for movement and yellow flame when the blower is running. Turn off your furnace power switch and see if the movement and the yellow flame changes.

And last, change your furnace filter! This is a good time of the year to remember to change your air filter as summer is over and the furnace has run many hours.

These are a few simple things you can do to make sure your family is warm, safe and comfortable this winter!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

An investment that never goes down.

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

The one thing you can be assured of with your investments in the stock market is that will continue to go up and down in value like a rollercoaster. You can count on your 401k to go down in value over the next unforeseen future and hopefully it will start to go back up in value. Real estate investments are on the way down, as is almost every investment vehicle out there. The one investment I know of that continues to generate a guaranteed return year after year regardless of the financial markets, is a new high efficiency heating and cooling system. It consiently saves you money and is the best investment you can make these days with your hard earned money.

A new high efficiency heating cooling system can be acquired for as little as $3500 to $4000 and can trim up to 40% off your annual gas bill and 30% off the part of your electric bill. This savings can be $300 or $400 per year in gas and $200 or $300 in electric. This is a substantial return on investment and when the new heating and cooling system pays for itself after six to eight years, the savings will be thousands of dollars over the projected life of the equipment of twenty to twenty five years. I know of no other guaranteed return that comes with no risk.

A lot of homeowners think that as long as their furnace continues to put out heat, it is safe to run on until it quits. This could not be farther from the truth. I visited a home last week with a twenty year old furnace in a crawl space that had been left to rust so bad that the flames rolled out the front of the unit and melted the gas pipe sealer out of the gas pipe and caused a open flame outside the furnace jacket that singed the floor joists above it and almost burned the house down. Had this happened at night, this malfunction could have burned this home to the ground and along with the entire family in it. The piece of mind that your family and home is safe along with the above mentioned savings, is another guaranteed return on your investment in new high efficiency heating and cooling system.

A whole house humidifier is also another product with a guaranteed return on investment. You can install a furnace mounted bypass humidifier or a steam generator humidifier in your home and start to save energy dollars immediately. Your gas furnace can dry the air out in your home to 10% to 15% relative humidity levels in the cold winter months and this dryness will cause you to turn up the thermostat to higher level to try and feel warm. Bring the moisture level up to 30% to 35% and you can turn down the thermostat and feel warmer, along with not having dry, scratchy skin, static electricity, bloody noses and higher gas bills than needed. For a small investment of $450 to $875, you can guarantee yourself of a return of all the above year after year.

The heating and cooling investment market is full of guaranteed returns. Ask your broker if he has any guarantees lately and I think you will soon find that investing in this arena is a sure fire thing.

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

What does “green” really mean?

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

Much has been published and written about “going Green” in your daily life and how important it is for all of us to contribute to the cause of the environment. But what does that mean for the average person and how can one make a difference? Does it mean being selective in what we buy and who we buy it from and how that company conducts it’s business? Does it mean planting trees to become carbon neutral? Does it mean recycling your waste to not burden the earth with products that could be used again in the manufacturing process instead of rusting away in a landfill somewhere? Does it mean not using energy wasting appliances that require the utility companies to produce more and more electric and gas for us to consume in old worn out systems that should have been replaced 10 years ago? I think it means all of the above and more.

Heating and cooling systems consume 1/3 of all energy produced in this country and most of those systems operate at a greatly reduced efficiency with waste accounting for 30 to 40 percent of all resources consumed. The way one can be “Green” in this regard is to keep their heating and cooling system operating at peak efficiency to minimize the waste inherent in the process. Old gas furnaces by design waste more gas up the flue or chimney than they use to heat your home. Let one get out of proper tune and it gets worse. Old air conditioners do a job cooling your home that could be done for 30 to 50 percent less electricity. Let an old air conditioner get out of tune and the waste could be upwards of 70 percent. Keep your system in perfect working order and replace the entire system when it gets old. Do not fall into the old pattern of letting you system go year after year with out service trying to save a buck in the short run.

After 12 to 15 years and it’s time to replace your heating and cooling system, do not just replace a single piece of equipment, but rather look at the entire system from a complete system approach. There are three major pieces of equipment to replace in a heating and cooling system; the furnace, the cooling coil and the outdoor condenser or air conditioner. When your car gets old and worn out, you would never consider just replacing the engine or the rear end and leaving the rest of the components 20 years old to possibly break down another day. Go “Green” in you own home by stop wasting more energy than needed. Stop using more than your fair share of natural resources. Make sure when it comes time to replace your system that you purchase from a “Green” contractor that recycles your old refrigerant, your old copper, steel, and aluminum and gives you advice and counseling on R410a “green” refrigerants, energy saving dehumidification thermostats and improved efficiencies. Install Energy Star compliant systems.

I feel being “Green” means more than how you separate your garbage or what type of car you drive. Can you imagine the change our world would see if everyone cut energy consumption by 50 percent overnight ? It can happen . Do your part to be “Green” and it will save you green in the long run.

Posted in Going Green | No Comments »