Annual maintenance is essential to keep your air conditioner operating at peak efficiency, especially when you need it most. Additionally, a properly functioning air conditioner reduces energy usage and related costs. Our A/C clean and check will ensure your summer will be cool and comfortable!
Cooling your home or business living spaces is as simple as cutting large blocks of ice from the lake in the winter and saving them until summer when you can blow air across them to cool you down. Right?
Well, the melting ice can be messy, and it’s kind of hard to hang on to the ice much past the month of June, so what can you do? Cooling has indeed been an age old problem since before the Pharaohs had their servants waving fans on them while they toiled on their thrones.
Home air conditioning really came into its own during the boom years a decade or so after World War II. Before that, people used fans, opened windows at night and pulled drapes during the day. They planted shade trees near their houses and situated new houses and windows to optimize summer breeze ventilation. And, of course, we’ve all seen vintage movies of people fanning themselves with a little fold up fan they carried with them during the summer.
With the post war building and baby boom came growing demand for central air conditioning. This was, and still is, accomplished by placing the system heart, called the “condenser”, outdoors, a cooling coil called the “A-coil” above the furnace inside of the ductwork indoors and connecting them with two copper pipelines called the “lineset”. The compressor inside the condenser pumps a chemical called “refrigerant” through the condenser coil where it compresses the gas into a liquid and literally squeezes the heat from it. From the hot outdoor condenser coil the liquid travels through one of the lineset pipes to the indoor A-coil where it passes through a metering device that causes the liquid to flash off and change state from liquid to gas. This causes a rapid pressure and temperature drop, the cold gas travels through the A-coil, the furnace blower moves the room air though the A-coil and the cold gas picks up the heat to take it back outdoors. By the time the gas leaves the A-coil it’s warmed up considerably and makes its way back to the compressor through the other lineset pipe where the compressor pumps it back into the condenser coil and the process begins again. In a nutshell, the refrigerant takes the heat from indoors and moves it outdoors.
The refrigerant that has been commonly used in air conditioning systems is called R22. As of the year 2020, R22 will no longer be manufactured per U.S. Federal EPA mandate. R22 will still be available, but the cost will be high. In an effort to meet EPA regulations, to reduce harmful effects to our atmosphere and to build systems that are more energy efficient, the industry has moved to new refrigerants, the most popular being R410a.
Regular maintenance to your air conditioning system will help your system run at its best efficiently and reliability. If your system is an R22 system, it’s important that it not be leaking refrigerant. Many R22 systems out there require routine “top off” charges every couple of years. A tight system that doesn’t leak will never need to be “topped off”. Systems that are older than 15 years, especially those that leak, really need to be replaced with a current high efficiency R410a system.
Call Klecker’s Heating & Air Conditioning today to learn more about your system and your options. Air conditioning systems have improved significantly over this past decade and there are a number of innovative ways to cool your home.
Read more about our Amana line of air conditioners by clicking here.
Call 920-261-9218 or use our contact form.
