Excited About Adding Rooms To Your Home? Your Air Conditioner May Not Share Your Joy
After renovating your home, you may notice that the air conditioner isn't cooling the place down as well as it used to. It may be on at all hours fruitlessly trying to reach the goal temperature, or it may even burn out after running and running without a break. This happens whenever the home's size or heat is increased, especially if it's increased greatly.
Your Old Air Conditioner May Not Be Big Enough
Unfortunately, with certain renovations this is just unavoidable. House expansions, for example, put a great deal of strain on an air conditioner that was already just barely large enough to suit your home. This is felt most when the addition is a kitchen or sunroom, which bring a great deal of new heat into your house. Sometimes it isn't just the expansion, but also the age of the air conditioner. Newer machines can be much more efficient for their size than ones built in the 70's and 80's.
Your might try to fight this by installing window units in the new rooms, but these are less efficient than comprehensive central air conditioning. They also will do nothing for your air quality, allowing humidity and air impurities to remain in the room. Last but not least, adding a new window conditioner to your home is just a temporary fix. They don't last nearly as long as central units, so you'll have to upgrade your main air conditioner eventually anyway.
...But Bigger Isn't Always Better
Reading that, you might think the solution is to go out and buy the biggest possible air conditioner to ensure that your home can always be cool, even if you add more rooms or people later. However, aiming for a larger machine than your home needs could actually be a bad idea.
Air conditioners do more than cool air: they also purify and dehumidify it. Typically these functions are only put into use while an air conditioner is turned on. When you install a machine that's stronger than your home needs, it won't end up actually being on for very long at any point in time. Instead, it will just kick on, cool the house quickly, and kick back off. As a result, you could end up with very humid and impure air in your home.
Aside from the discomfort associated with high humidity, this could also put your home in danger. Humid air eventually condensates on solid surfaces, and in your home these surfaces include the insides of your walls, ceiling, and floor. If the home is not properly dehumidified, this constant moisture could lead to mold growth, which can devalue your home and make you sick to boot.
You Can Calculate The Right Size
Fortunately, you don't have to worry about sticking with your too-small air conditioner or upgrading to one that's too large. Instead, you can use the ENERGY STAR guidelines to calculate how many BTUs, or units of heat, your air conditioner needs to be able to handle.
First, you'll need to ascertain the square footage of your home by measuring the rooms, including the new ones. Once you know roughly how large your house is, you can use the ENERGY STAR chart to look up the baseline for what capacity a conditioner needs in order to cool down your empty home. When you have this number, add in the heat produced by the people in your home and extenuating factors like how much sun your home gets, and you should end up with an ideal capacity for your next air conditioner.
Once you get your capacity, all you have to do is talk to an HVAC technician about upgrading your system, and you should be able to get a list of appropriate machines from various manufacturers. With help from the professionals at places like HomeSmart From Xcel Energy, you can hopefully find an air conditioner that will be able to handle whatever you can throw at it.
Share
