Air Conditioning…. already ???
Good Grief !
The weather’s gone freaky on us!
Just two weeks ago, we had frost warnings. Now, today, it got up to 88 degrees (plus humidity)!
My wife turned on the air conditioning, but only the blower fan turned on. The fan on the condenser unit outside of the house never kicked on. I went out and took off the cover to look for some sort of reset switch, but didn’t find any. What I DID find was that the guys who worked on the unit late last summer apparently connected some sort of can into the system. This can apparently has something in it that’s designed to give a “kick start” to the unit, but I guess that isn’t working.
I’m going to call the company that worked with us last year on this: Frechin Heating & Cooling. But unfortunately, my wife won’t be at the house until later this afternoon to let them in. (Not that I think I’ll be able to schedule same day service on day #2 of 85+ degree heat!)
For the past few weeks, wife and I had been discussing what to do about cooling the second floor down this summer. We figured we’d put some short-term plan into place while investigating a long-term plan.
The short-term plan was to buy one of those room A/C units that looks like an extra-large shop-vac ? One that has a hose that attaches to a plastic “slot” that you stick out your window. This is better cosmetically, as people won’t look at the house and see a blocky A/C unit sticking out of the window itself. They’d have to be very observant, I think, to see the slot. It seems like this would be a $275 solution that would only really cool one room. But that’d be enough to get us by this summer, I think.
As far as a long-term solution goes, I’ve received the following advice from others:
1) Install a second central air unit in the attic. Run the two pipes that need to connect to the condenser unit out through an exterior wall, down the side of the house, and out to a second condenser unit placed somewhere around the house at ground level. Put in ducts in the attic that enter down into the second floor ceiling. I’m told one should get this second a/c unit suspended from the roof joists and not sitting on the floor. Not sure why, though.
2) Install a “high-velocity” system. This is a unit that allows you to snake small-diameter (about 4 inches?) flexible tubing through your walls, instead of larger ducts, so that you don’t have to tear up your walls as much. This method is apparently used frequently in older homes. The tubes usually enter the room in some inconspicuous place in the corner of a ceiling. They throw out air a lot faster than normal ducts, so a bit of air movement will be felt in the room. The down sides to this method seem to be: a high price-tag…. plus the fact that apparently, you shouldn’t combine such a system with using a pre-existing central-air system.
3) Add a second thermostat on the upper level and automatic dampeners on the currently-existing ductwork…. so that the currently-existing A/C will apparently be able to cool either the first floor, the second floor, or both floors at once. This sounds very, very interesting to me, since I get the impression we’ll have to replace our condenser unit anyways…. and this method sounds like it’s the least intrusive. However, I question whether our current blower would be able to handle the task. And I know our ducts are kind of old and leaky. They may want to replace some of our ductwork if we were to choose this route.
Well, if I end up being at home whenever the A/C guys come out (not likely), I’ll ask them about these three methods.
Thanks for stopping by!
-= Dave =-
P.S. I just uploaded some photos of our new kitten, Clarise! My apologies for the fact that the photos are about one month old. I’ve placed the photos in the category I made a few weeks ago for our Spring photos !