subject: Select the Best Air Conditioner for Your Home [print this page] Select the Best Air Conditioner for Your Home
Over the past 30 years, HVAC expert Fred Peterson and his company All Seasons Heating and Air Conditioning, Inc.have been serving the clients in Champaign, Illinois and the surrounding areas. The company's mission was, and still is, to be a business with great technical abilities and the highest integrity possible. Here, Peterson talks about how to choose the best air conditioner for your home.
It is not easy for a homeowner to choose the best air conditioner for his home. After all, there are so many types or brands on the market these days. In my opinion, when you're frozen in fear with having so many options and choices in front of you, the place to turn for advice is an HVAC professional.
In Champaign, my company helps clients decide which HVAC systems to have installed in their homes. When making such a major decision, the first place to start is by looking at the size of the room or home that needs to be cooled. In order to properly size a home to determine what type of air conditioning unit to put in, my company does what is known as a "Manual J."
Manual J Load Calculation
A Manual J is a type of HVAC load calculation that air conditioning technicians across the nation use to gauge the heat load and heat loss in a home. We do it to correctly size furnaces and air conditioners. When an air conditioning unit has been sized correctly, that means that the system is large enough to cool the home in any situation but small enough that it is not wasting energy.
In working on a Manual J load calculation, we will typically take the square footage of the home, or other space where the air conditioner will be working, and also look at the exposures of the windows and doors at the same time. If a lot of direct sunlight comes in through the windows of a home, for example, then that has to be taken into consideration when doing the Manual J load calculation and choosing the best air conditioner for the space. In addition, we also look at how much glass the house has and what direction the home's windows are facing in order to get a heat load estimate that is as accurate as possible.
Two-Stage Equipment
When it comes to the air conditioners that homeowners commonly request information on, the best systems are known as "two-stage equipment." What that means is that the air conditioning system has "two levels of cooling capacity," as opposed to just one level with a single stage system. So from the moderate weather to the extreme weather, we are sized correctly with a two stage cooling system.
Two-stage HVAC systems can remove much more humidity from the air in a room than a single stage air conditioner is able to. That is another reason why two-stage HVAC systems are so popular with homeowners in Champaign. In places where humidity is an issuewhich really in the case in the majority of the countrytwo-stage air conditioning systems are almost always preferred.
Single Stage System
On the other hand, in some scenarios, a single stage air conditioner may be the better option. When the outdoor air temperature reaches 95 degrees Fahrenheit, single stage air conditioners are at their optimum performance. They are designed for your hottest days, so their best performance is when there is an outdoor temperature at approximately 95 degrees.
In HVAC lingo, the term "best performance" means the same thing as peak efficiency. That is, the time when the air conditioner is running at its optimum levels. For people who live in climates where the outside temperature does not regularly get to 95 degrees, though, single stage systems might not be the best option. Unless you have got 95 degree days repeatedly, then basically you air conditioner is always going to be oversized.
Although air conditioners usually look the same from an outside perspective, the prices from one model to another can vary greatly. The pricing difference from a top-tier HVAC unit to a bottom-tier unit can be two to two-and-a-half times more for the top-tier air conditioner. No matter what brand or type of system a customer chooses, though, the price for installation will usually be the same.
If you need a new HVAC system in Champaign, then be smart to stick with a model made by York or American Standard, since those are two brands I commonly recommend. While most air conditioning units are built similarly, the design load of an air conditioner can differ from one region to another. So in other words, what they are sized for depends on the region they are being sold in. But even then, they are still all sized basically the same way, just with different design temperatures.
