Watts In This For Me?: a Skeptic's Guide to Home Energy Efficiency by Jeffrey Tamburro

Author:Jeffrey Tamburro [Tamburro, Jeffrey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781927677216
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2013-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

Heating And Cooling

Keep Comfortable Year Round

“Winter is the season in which people try to keep the house as warm as it was in the summer, when they complained about the heat.”

Unknown

“It was luxuries like air conditioning that brought down the Roman Empire. With air conditioning their windows were shut, they couldn't hear the barbarians coming.”

Garrison Keillor

Once you have sealed all the cracks in your house, beefed up the insulation and corrected any issues with the duct system, you are ready for the next step. It’s time to address the heating and cooling needs of your house. What you will find after making your house more air-tight is you will probably not need as big a furnace or air conditioner as you currently have. Your first step is to make sure your heating and cooling equipment is properly sized for your house. Improperly sized equipment is not only inefficient; it can also wear out prematurely, forcing you to have costly repair or replacement expenses.

If your furnace or air conditioner is too big for your house, they’ll turn on and off too much as they try to deliver warm or cool air. This is called short-cycling. It puts a lot of stress on your equipment, causing it to wear out quicker than it is supposed to. Short-cycling can also create excess moisture in your home, which can cause health issues or damage to the home or its contents. If your furnace or air conditioner is too small, it will not be able to heat or cool your home properly and will run all the time as it tries to do so. This will also put unnecessary strain on your heating and cooling equipment, causing them to wear out prematurely.

Some heating and air conditioning contractors tend to subscribe to the “bigger is better” school of thought. As a result, it is more common to see oversized equipment in a house rather than undersized. When the equipment is sized for your home, the heating and air conditioning contractors do a series of calculations that take into consideration such things as climate zone data, the square footage of the house, the number of windows, the orientation of the house, how well it is insulated and how well the ducts are sealed. What often happens at this point is contractors “add” to their sizing calculations in order to overcompensate for the hottest or coldest days typically found in your area. What you then wind up with is a furnace sized for the handful of days when it is extremely cold or an air conditioner sized for when it is extremely hot. For the remainder of the year, when the temperatures are not at these extremes, your heating and cooling equipment will short-cycle because they are blowing too much air into your house. Another reason for oversized equipment is to overcompensate for homes that are very leaky. This is the situation I described in the chapter on air sealing. Fortunately, heating and air conditioning contractors have become much better about calculating needs and sizing the equipment they install.

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