Uneven Cooling In Your Home? How Our Air Conditioning Service Can Help | Richardson, TX
Photo By tommaso79 at istock
Does your home have strange pockets of warm or extra cold air when your air conditioning runs? Do you find yourself dressing warmer to relax in some rooms, while your main living space is comfortably cool? At One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating of Dallas, we can help our Richardson, TX customers balance their cooling for an even temperature all over. There are many issues that can cause your home’s AC to distribute cool air in an unbalanced way, and our air conditioning service has the experience and skills to find them.
While you might call our air conditioning service team to help with your home’s varying levels of comfort, it’s also a good idea because unbalanced cooling and air circulation has many specific causes that need attention anyway. Some are simple, like replacing a full air filter, which will not only get your air circulating better but also benefit your HVAC system’s overall efficiency and longevity. Our air conditioning service can explain to you how each factor contributes to your temperature control, and also how it can help you get better performance from your AC system. We can also offer modifications and upgrades that can make an amazing difference in your comfort at home. Relying on our Richardson, TX air conditioning service team gives you access to experts who can take care of your AC system, and also answer your questions about heating and cooling your home in the way that’s right for you.
Getting Comfortable Can Also Get Important Repairs Performed for Your Air Conditioning System
If you’ve gotten used to having cold spots and warm spots around your home, of picking your reading and relaxing location to avoid cold blasts of air or strange combinations of cool and warm, it’s time to look into the reason things aren’t right. If you don’t feel right because of varying temperatures, your body might also be more vulnerable to illness as it is stressed by constantly adjusting to temperatures. Our air conditioning service team has extensive experience in identifying the factors that combine to cause irregular cooling in your home. We can use that knowledge to locate problems in your duct system that carries air around, even components of the ducts you didn’t know about like damper doors that could be cutting off your cold air. If your ducts run through your attic there are several specific issues we look for up there. Our air conditioning service also factors in your cooling system’s capacity, which can actually cause problems if it’s too much or too little.
Older units can also introduce capacity problems, as can units that just haven’t been maintained and have lost efficiency. Vent problems can cause airflow issues both locally and as a consequence in other rooms, while a neglected air filter produces air circulation issues throughout your house as well as performance issues due to the stress on your system from a heavy accumulation of dust and other materials on the filter. Our Richardson, TX air conditioning service can help you locate, check, and replace your air filter, and tell you how often it typically should be replaced with a similar model. In addition to cool airflow, addressing these issues can help you keep allergens, mold, dust, and debris from circulating and avoid the accumulation of these in your ducts over time. Circulation can also be affected by over or underpowered AC units that lead to incorrect cooling cycles, lower energy efficiency, and more wear and tear on the components of your AC system. Our air conditioning service can actually provide a host of benefits when they investigate your unbalanced cooling problem.
Air Vent Evaluation
Where are your air vents located, and are they freely blowing cool air into the room? Are your air intake vents also open and drawing in the air without issue? In many homes, the vents can be blocked by misplaced furniture after cleaning or rearranging for a party. Suddenly, you’re cooling the bottom of a chair rather than spreading cool air into the room. Intakes often have obstructions also and may have an accumulation of material such as dust, pet toys, or papers that they pulled in and are now blocking airflow. Vents in the ceiling can be blocked as well by bookshelves and other tall furniture that redirects cool air from the vent. Our air conditioning service can also look for obstructions further down into the vent. If someone has shut the vent in an attempt to reduce the cooling in one location, unfortunately, that can cause circulation problems also, as the balance is affected by the pressure changes resulting from a closed vent. Our air conditioning service can offer other solutions if it’s necessary to keep some areas warmer than others in your home. We’ll also check vent aiming and placement, since your use of spaces in your home may have changed considerably since your HVAC system was installed, and airflow should change with it.
Proper Duct Airflow Is Essential to Your Home’s Cooling
Problems in your home’s ducts, which may run in many spaces including the attic, can result in minimal airflow or unbalanced cooling due to duct leaks, long runs of ducting, and a lack of duct insulation in spaces like your attic. Routing problems can also cause airflow issues, as there may be kinks, tight bends, and sometimes loops that slow the flow of air and also may create areas where material from the air is deposited over time, even more than what happens throughout the house. Our Richardson, TX air conditioning service provides whole-house duct cleaning, which we recommend on a periodic basis to ensure that your ducts stay fairly clear of dust and other contaminants, keeping your air quality higher. Some homes that have gone without duct cleaning for decades have found the capacity of their ducts is reduced from the large amount of material that has accumulated and lined the duct walls. With large accumulations, allergens, dust, and other particles can break off and flow throughout the system again, causing respiratory issues in sensitive people, and increased dust accumulation on furniture. Even straight duct runs with leaks can slow airflow and generate accumulations of dust and debris. Our air conditioning service can check your ducts for leaks, find disconnections especially in the attic, and repair or replace damaged and dented sections. We can also check airflow with special instruments to locate other hidden problems. For example, in some systems, there are booster fans and damper doors that help regulate airflow, and problems with these such as stuck damper doors can result in unexpected airflow problems.
Investing in Duct Zoning Can Make a Big Difference in Comfort and Energy Efficiency
It’s definitely not a simple fix, but duct zoning can make a big difference in your temperature consistency throughout the house. It can also provide a way to select which rooms you keep cooled, and which unoccupied rooms don’t need to be as cold, which saves energy and reduces wear on your systems. Duct zoning is the division of your duct system by our air conditioning service into several zones, such as bedrooms, living room, and basement, with thermostats controlling them separately. This gives your system the ability to sense your home’s temperature in multiple locations, and better balance its efforts at cooling. After all, each area may have different cooling needs. Your bedrooms may have solar heating from lots of windows or an uninsulated ceiling that needs to be compensated for, while your basement doesn’t require much cooling at all, and your living room may only need moderate cooling. Our air conditioning service can design a zoned system that better suits your needs than a single duct system, and provide ways to manage the temperature including smart and intelligent thermostats, timer-based thermostats, and connections to your smart home system that could incorporate solar heating factors into its cooling management.
Regular Air Filter Changes Are Critical for Your Comfort and Your System’s Operation
It’s a simple routine that our air conditioning service can show you since for most systems filter changes are needed approximately monthly. It’s important to use the right kind of filter, and simply replace the current one with a new one. If the current filter is particularly full of dust and other material, even more, frequent replacement might be a good idea. The benefits go far beyond better air circulation since your system won’t have to work the air circulation components as hard, wearing out motors and related components in the process. Since reduced air circulation puts a strain on your air conditioning equipment as well as it tries to keep your home cool with less airflow, air filter changes help improve the longevity of your air conditioning system as a whole. There’s also another area, somewhat unexpected, where air filter changes make a big difference because of the way air conditioning works. In your home, the evaporator coils take in warm air and cool it, removing moisture at the same time. Your system sends the cool air onward to your home, the moisture drains away, and everything operates nicely until the warm air intake slows, often due to a blocked air filter. At that point the coils start to freeze the moisture, causing icing and preventing any airflow from passing through. Your system will then stop providing cool air until our air conditioning service comes and not only defrosts the evaporator coils but replaces the air filter to ensure that the situation is not repeated right away.
Overpowered and Underpowered Air Conditioning Units
If your system has too much cooling capacity for your needs, or too little, it can affect the way your system cools your home and produce strange results. For example, excessive capacity often results in something called “short cycling,” where the thermostat cuts operation shortly before the cool airflow has had a chance to reach all the way across your home. You wind up with a big difference in temperature between some areas and others, and an unpleasantly cold draft while the system is operating. Insufficient cooling capacity, on the other hand, results in your system continuing to run to try to cool down to the thermostat setting, perhaps never even reaching that temperature. Your home will still not be a comfortable, consistent temperature, and your blowers, AC unit, and other components will work extra hard without rest, costing more in energy use and wear and tear.
Older AC Units and Ones Without Regular Maintenance
If your older AC system has reduced capacity, there may be a similar effect to the endless operation that a unit with insufficient capacity experiences, wearing out your older unit even faster. One reason that older units reach this point, however, is because of a lack of maintenance that has reduced its ability to cool and circulate cooled air. Our team’s maintenance services include care for the heat transfer coils outdoors and in the indoor unit, where dirty coils can result in inefficiency, and reduced refrigerant levels can also limit capacity as well as damage the compressor unit. Further cleaning and repairs to your system can increase reliability such as fan motor and belt replacement, electrical equipment cleaning and testing, and cleaning of drain systems that could otherwise grow mold and overflow onto nearby areas. In some homes that’s the basement, in other homes the attic where cleanup could be difficult. Rely on our experts to keep your system doing its best for your air conditioner.
Your Expert Air Conditioning Service in Richardson, TX
At One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating of Dallas, our air conditioning professional team goes beyond repairs, maintenance, and upgrades to increase AC benefits for your Richardson, TX home. We understand how all the components of your AC system work together, and our air conditioning service addresses the big picture so you get energy efficiency, comfort, and reliability enhancements together. Give us a call to help you enjoy the cool more this summer.
