Getting the Most Out of Your Heat Pump

Heat pumps, like other hvac systems,  require require the proper operating techniques to run it's best. The combination of caring for your heat pump in the right way and setting up annual maintenance with your local hvac company can result in a system that is 10-25% more efficient than a neglected one.

Here are some tips to  ensure maximum efficiency between professional maintenance:

• Use the “auto” fan setting. This allows the thermostat to control the fan and achieve optimal performance. It is also easier on the unit than the constant turning it up and turning it down. 
• Change the filter once per quarter or as needed.  A new filter will ensure proper airflow and put less strain on the compressor. A new filter is much cheaper than repairing the unit.
• Clean the outdoor coils periodically. If dirt appears on the outside, that’s your cue to hose down the outdoor coils. You should also keep plants trimmed back so they don’t obstruct airflow.

At least once or twice per year, you should schedule preventative maintenance . During a routine maintenance check a professional HVAC service tech will do the following tasks:

• Inspect the system for dirt or obstructions and clean it out
• Check for adequate airflow
• Check the refrigerant charge and fix any leaks
• Verify that electric connections are clean and tight
• Lubricate the blower motor
• Inspect belts for wear and tightness
• Ensure the thermostat is operating correctly
• Diagnose leaky ducts and seal them if needed

Each of these checks will keep your heat pump in it's best condition for years to come, helping you avoid expensive repairs and delaying replacements. 

A Ductless Mini-Split System: The Many Benefits Of A Heat Pump

Whether your entire house - or perhaps just an area that has been added on - is lacking in ductwork, an excellent solution for air conditioning is the ductless mini-split system. This style of system incorporates an outside unit with an indoor unit placed in the wall. Both are attached directly in a more efficient fashion than a window air conditioning unit. Here's some of the benefits of installing a ductless mini-split system inside your Bay Area home.

• Ideal for zoning: Cooling down certain areas individually is achievable with zoning systems, contributing to energy savings and customised comfort. With as many as 4 indoor air controlling units for every outside unit, you could achieve as much as four zones in your house having a ductless mini-split system.

• Simple to install: The hook-up requires merely a three-inch hole inside the wall for connecting the inside and outside units. There's no ductwork necessary, and also the outdoor unit may be placed up to Fifty feet from your indoor evaporator, so that you can install the outdoor unit inside of a shady, very discreet spot.

• Efficient: Central air conditioning units have to overcome the inefficiencies of duc-twork, and window ac units are especially challenging to seal off. By using an intrinsically efficient ductless mini-split system and closing the space around the hook-up, you could get the very best cooling capacity for your buck.

• Silent operation: Because the blower is within your immediate area, the circulation of air is likely to be louder compared to a central A/C system, however ductless mini-splits are a lot quieter than window air conditioning units. The humming compressor is outdoors and the unit can be set up to function on low speed for the most quiet operation attainable.

• Flexible home decor choices: You could attach the indoor unit flush to a drop ceiling, hang it from your ceiling, or install it into the wall. Having a standard depth of just 7 inches, as well as a streamlined, modern-looking jacket, ductless mini-split systems don't take away from from the appearance of your house.

To learn more pertaining to ductless mini-split systems, please don't hesitate to get in touch with Sandim Heating & Air Conditioning in the South San Francisco Bay Area today

Make Sure You Plan Routine Maintenance For Your Heat Pump Before It’s Too Late

Once the weather conditions begins to cool, it’s time for you to schedule a heat pump servicing. You should prepare your devices some time before wintertime arrives for a number of reasons.

Primary advantages of regular routine maintenance include:

• Conserving money: Yearly tune-ups are considerably less expensive than the repair or replacement service. Your system will be more cost-effective, which lowers your power bills.

• Make repairs or improvements: Have an experienced technician evaluate the condition of each and every element of the system and recommend any needed fixes or upgrades prior to winter. Cold temperatures cuts down on the efficiency of the heat pump. That’s because your internal coils need to start generating heat to add to the heat in the air, so it’s essential that they’re clean and in good shape.

Schedule a heat pump servicing by using a certified professional who'll perform a complete, comprehensive job of:

• Testing airflow: In accordance with Energy Star, over fifty percent of the heat pumps within the U.S. have substantial issues with low airflow and leaking ducts. Certified technicians will test ventilation with state-of-the-art instruments to uncover and correct any problems.

• Sizing and fixing ducts: Defective ducts makes it possible for as much as 30 % of one's treated air to leave before it gets to the intended area. Therefore, issues with your ductwork really need to be identified so you comprehend any performance problems and prepare for repairs should they be needed.

• Cleaning and replacing of filters: This should be done every 2 to 6 months, but particularly at the start of the heating time of year.

• Cleaning your system thoroughly: Every single component part ought to be properly cleaned out and cleared of all the dirt. That also includes the entire evaporator coil, condensate tray, outdoor coils, supply and returning registers, blower fan rotor blades as well as the space around the equipment.

• Examining the motor and belts: The inner parts should really be examined to ensure they are in very good repair with plenty amount of lubrication where it's required.

• Testing electrical and protective controls:  All of the controls and electrical wiring ought to be tested to ensure they are working properly and accurately.

To schedule heat pump maintenance for your home, contact your local Sandium heat pump specialist.  We provide expert HVAC service to the South Bay Area and surrounding areas.

Allergic Reactions at Home? You Need a Whole House Air Purifier

Throughout the Spring months, those of us with allergy symptoms are dreading the itchy eyes, dripping noses, coughing and sneezing that allergy season brings.

 

There's only so much that you can do to guard yourself when away from the home; but indoors, you could choose a whole home air cleaner so you know that you and your loved ones can at least breathe easy in your house. Pollen is among one of many allergens there are. Recent reports have revealed that as much as 15% of folks have dust allergies but as many as 50% of asthma affected individuals are allergic to dust and around 30% of individuals who are afflicted by allergies are allergic to pet dander.

 

An entire house air purifier is very effective at filtering out dust, pollen, pet dander, bacteria as well as other pollutants - up to 98% of airborne allergens are filtered with a whole house air cleaner. A central air filtering system is set up in your current a / c or central heating system and dependant upon the model, could be effective in homes as much as 5000 sq . ft .

 

Do I Need a Whole Home Air Cleaner?

 

That will depend on who within your family would gain from cleaner air and where you spend the vast majority of of your time. The IQAir Perfect 16 is the almost all effective whole house air purifier and is also very effective at cleansing the air in homes up to 5000 square feet however some central air purifiers are only effective for houses around 2000 sq ft. If several members of the family have allergies, a whole house air purifier would be effective at substantially decreasing allergens but if just one person in your house has allergies and spends most of the time in the family room, a portable home air purifier might be all that's necessary. This could then be transferred to the bedroom at nighttime, if it's needed.

 

You may improve the quality of air in your home and allow your lungs a rest by using a whole house air purifier. Though allergy medications work well at eliminating the signs of your allergies, they just don't eliminate the irritants that actually cause the problem in the first place. By reduction of the allergens in your house by having an home air cleaner, you have one less thing to fret about this coming spring!

 

Are you aware that the quality of air in your house may very well be more irritating than the air quality outdoors? The environment in your home may very well be helping to make your allergies more irritating! Whole home air purifiers successfully remove up to 99% of allergens within the air to bring you relief from your allergies.

 

Easy Home Electricity Savings By Duct Sealing and Insulation

Most people are searching for ways to "go green" nowadays. From water bottles made from plants, to old tires becoming development materials, businesses everywhere are marketing "green". All of this talk of carbon footprints and global warming has successfully made its way into the everyday vernacular and left homeowners evaluating their own impact.

Their are a number of gimmicks around to maximize your electricity efficiency and reduced your power bills, but most of them just pray on an increasingly energy conscious public. Doing work in the weatherization field I frequently get questioned for advice on cutting back on utilities and making a home more energy-efficient. I usually respond by telling the homeowner to adhere to some basic steps: shut off lights that are not being used, and then get a programmable thermostat assuming they don't curently have one.

If they need to do more however, I let them know that one of the greatest returns on investment for virtually any house is raising the efficiency of their forced-air heating and air conditioning system. Typical cooling and heating systems may be over 20 % inefficient. These inefficiencies signify that for each and every five dollars in paying to heat or cool your home, a dollar has been thrown away trying to condition your attic or unfinished basement. For those who spend $2000 dollars per year on heating and air conditioning utilities it's a waste of $400! That's money you're wasting and greenhouse gases which are being produced without real gain. Give it some thought, the less energy-efficient your house, the more you undoubtedly pay to pollute our environment.

By sealing and insulating your ducts you could dramatically boost your systems efficiency. Improperly sealed ducts can dump your conditioned air (air that's the humidity and temperature you prefer) back into the non-conditioned areas the ducts are running through. It's efficiency lost! Additionally, non-sealed return ducts will in fact pull the non-conditioned air surrounding them into your ducts causing your system to have to work much harder to maintain your house for the desired humidity and temperature. Certain house appliances for example hot water heaters and furnaces may also emit dangerous gases like deadly carbon monoxide which could then be drawn in to the ducts through leaky return ducts.

Not insulating your ducts is actually as bad as not insulating your home. Not only does insulating your ducts reduce condensation which can cause moisture problems and toxic mold, but it also assists in keeping the air within the duct the proper temperature. Consider this, if your ducts are carrying 72 degree air yet the ducts are the same temperature as a basement, say 50 degrees, this is a 20 degree temperature battle taking place from your furnace till the air makes its way out into your livable areas of your home.

Duct sealing and insulation is inexpensive as a do-it-yourself project. When you understand what to find and where you should go, you may easily do-it-yourself throughout the course of a few weekends. You don't have to shut off your furnace or air conditioning system to insulate and seal the ducts. Obviously, I normally recommend getting a professional get it done if you aren't very technically inclined, however this is among the safer DIY projects. In either case with all the expense of energy increasing this can be a great project for you to do and also to realize an incredibly quick return-on-investment.

Insulation to Help Keep Us Warm - Not Warm the Planet

I've been quite vocal in regards to a real problem with some of our most typical insulation materials: that they're manufactured by using blowing agents that have highly concentrated greenhouse gases.

All extruded polystyrene (XPS) and almost all closed-cell spray polyurethane foams (SPF) are produced with HFC (hydrofluorocarbon) blowing agents which have global warming potentials (GWPs) many hundreds of times higher than that of carbon dioxide. (Sorry for contaminating this column with the amount of acronyms!)


Insulation: great news, not so great news

Insulation materials help our houses save energy and, by doing this, they decrease the burning of fossil fuels and the release of greenhouse gases.

However, if the insulation material itself is made using a very-high-GWP blowing agent which could eventually escape from the insulation, adding a great deal of insulation might actually be a very bad thing from the viewpoint of mitigating climate change. All that was detailed in my article several years ago, "Avoiding the Global Warming Effects of Insulation" and, in depth, in the EBN feature write-up on the exact same topic.


OK for ozone, detrimental for the climate

With XPS, the blowing agent HFC-134a has a GWP of 1,430, which means that it's 1,430 times as potent as carbon dioxide (that is defined as having a GWP of 1). Almost all closed-cell SPF is produced with the blowing agent HFC-245fa, which has a GWP of 1,030.

Relative to global warming, all these blowing agents aren't as bad as the CFCs that have been used originally, however they are as bad as the HCFCs (hydrochlorocfluorcarbons) that have been adopted as second-generation blowing agents. (Both HFCs and HFOs are believed to be completely safe for the ozone, which is the reason CFCs and HCFCs happen to be eliminated.)



Blowing agents: the next generation

Anyhow, given all of this, I've been closely following the breakthroughs by industry in developing alternatives which are neither ozone depleters nor considerable greenhouse gases.

A couple of years ago, it appeared that the primary candidates were HFOs (hydrofluoroolefins), and Honeywell revealed the development of this sort of product in 2011. And also, it was just reported a couple weeks ago that Whirlpool, the nation's biggest home appliance company (with such brands as Maytag, Amana, Jenn-Air, and KitchenAid, as well as Whirlpool), was shifting to a different HFO blowing agent for the polyurethane insulation in all of its refrigerators.

Whirlpool is going to be utilizing the new Solstice Liquid Blowing Agent created by Honeywell, one of the nation's 3 makers of blowing agents (as well as DuPont and Arkema). Solstice HFO has zero ozone depletion potential and a GWP of just 4.7 to 7.0-similar to that of the numerous hydrocarbon blowing agents found in expanded polystyrene and polyisocyanurate - and insignificant relative to global warming.


Performance enhancement an additional benefit

Further more, Solstice HFO will increase the R-value of the insulation components just a little. Compared to HFC-245fa, this HFO yields insulation with 2% higher R-value, and in contrast to hydrocarbon blowing agents it provides an 8% to 10% enchancment, determined by Honeywell.

While the improvement is fantastic, it's not instant. The HFO has recently received its approvals from the united states government, and this will require sometime to ramp up manufacturing and switch refrigerator manufacturers to the new foam. Whirlpool plans to get started on integrating the new blowing agents into its refrigerators in end of the 2013.


Spray-foam producers not so quick to adopt HFOs

But what about the closed-cell SPF insulation that's widely used to insulate buildings?

SPF manufacturers will likely be exchanging the HFC-245fa with HFO . but it's uncertain exactly when that could happen. Rick Duncan, the technical director at the Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance (SPFA), the trade association serving the SPF industry, explained to me that some SPF manufacturers ("system houses") are performing field tests with the new HFO blowing agents, and not all of them. (At least one manufacturer, Icynene, also produces a water-blown, medium-density foam, MD-R-200, which insulates to R-5.2 per inch and is known as both an open-cell and closed-cell product in the Icynene web-site; just about all other water-blown SPF products are thought to be discontinued.)

Unlike in 2003 when federal rules required a change from HCFC to HFC blowing agents as a consequence of ozone depletion fears, there are no similar regulations demanding a switch from HFCs to HFOs.


It's up to us

Plus the conversion process requires time and is also really expensive - about 12 months and a minimum of $100,000, says Duncan. With the building industry still in an market recession, companies aren't planning to invest a lot of extra money on product advancement.

Duncan feels, however, that after a new life-cycle assessment (LCA) report on SPF is released that SPFA is now finalizing, consumers will start requesting for lower-GWP foam and manufacturers will answer by making it. From an environmental perspective, open-cell SPF (which doesn't contain HFC blowing agents) has just 1/20th the global warming effects of closed-cell SPF.


A lot less action in the XPS camp

I wasn't capable of getting nearly as much information and facts from the extruded polystyrene industry about when the HFC-134a may be substituted with a lower-GWP blowing agent and whether there's a gaseous type of HFO which could work with that industry. (While a liquefied blowing agent is utilized in developing SPF, a gaseous blowing agent is essential for XPS.)

Jan McKinnon, the senior communications director at Dow Building Solutions (manufacturer of Dow Styrofoam XPS), states that this company is seeking solutions to decrease its greenhouse gas pollution levels. "Since the kick off of our new formulation in 2010 [converting from HCFC-142b to HFC-134a], we keep looking at reducing our blowing agent global warming potential, and we have an proactive process in position to lower it by 15%," she informed me. She said that they are actively evaluating alternative blowing agents for XPS, "but a good number of of these technologies are still in their infancy."


Not a terrific time to invest in products

Each of the SPF and XPS markets already have experienced a couple of significant changes: from CFC to HCFC blowing agents and then from HCFC to HFC blowing agents.

With a weakened constructing economy and depressed sales and profits of constructing supplies, excitement for a 3rd significant conversion has been very little. However I feel that you will see a increasing demand to make products with very little affect on global climate change as is possible - and in case this year's heat and drought continue on, that demand may possibly increase.

Let's hope so.

Facts to Know About Heat Pumps

You do not have to be a HVAC professional to understand how heat pumps function. If you have one then you should know how it works. 

Heat pumps work like regular systems during the AC season. Keep that in mind when you have one installed in your home.

With a heat pump you should not turn your AC system off. Only using the cooling system on a part-time basis can cost you money in energy bills and repair costs to the system. If you turn it off when you are out of the house, your home will soak up the heat that is there and this will make cooling in the late afternoon/evening much harder to accomplish. You will save $ when you let the thermostat  decide when cooling is required for your home.

The heat pumps in your home will provide warm air during the time of the year when you need heat. The pump will run for long durations of time. They are designed to operate in this manner.

When it is the coldest outside, frost will build up in the outdoor coil of the heat pump. This will begin a cycle of defrosting. When the cycle is taking place, the outdoor fan will stop running and the compressor will make a humming sound.

You will notice that cool air is coming from the registers. You may also hear a whooshing sound and will see water runoff or steam coming from the unit. These functions are all normal and are related to the cycle of defrosting.

During this defrosting cycle, allow it to do its thing. Do not make any changes to the thermostat. The cycle will take anywhere from a couple of minutes to 10.  The time depends on the amount of ice build up on the coil. Once the cycle is finished, the unit will return to the heating function.

If you believe that the heat pump is not working properly, you should call in a professional to evaluate the system. Do not attempt to repair it on your own- you could do more harm than good.

Do not constantly adjust your thermostat. It is best to find a comfortable temperature and then leave it at that setting. There will be more wear and tear on the system if you fiddle with the temp all time. As well, it can be anything but budget savvy to do this.