We hope you had your regular maintenance done on your heat pump or air conditioner before summer started. It’s the best way to decrease wear and tear, helping with efficiency, cooling performance, and keeping your system running for as long as possible while requiring few repairs. But the fact is, it’s been a while since that maintenance took place, and it’s still very hot outside. What can you do to help your air conditioner or heat pump cope with a heatwave in late summer? Here are five tips that can make a big difference.
1: Consider Your Thermostat Setting
It’s clear that refrigeration technology is capable of some pretty powerful cooling. Walk-in freezers are an extreme example. But your air conditioner wasn’t designed to operate that way. In order to maximize efficiency, air conditioners are not meant to lower the temperature by any more than twenty degrees. This means that when it’s 105 outside, you should set your thermostat to 85. Setting it any lower makes the air conditioner work much harder than it’s designed to, which can damage the all-important and often irreplaceable compressor. Still too hot? Consider these options.
2: Keep the Heat Out
Are there gaps under your doors? Are there cracks around your window frames? Seal everything up to keep your conditioned air in and the heat out. Door gaps can be remedied with door-bottom weather stripping. Window leaks can be resolved with narrow strips of foam or rope caulk. And what about the sunshine? If it’s hitting a window, it’s causing a greenhouse effect, and if you want to stay cool and comfortable (and you aren’t a tropical plant) you should cover those windows until the sun moves away.
3: Run Your Ceiling Fans
Your body cools itself by dispersing heat into the air. As long as that air is even a tiny bit cooler than your body, each molecule of it that touches you will carry a tiny bit of your heat away. Setting your ceiling fans to turn counter-clockwise and keeping them on while you’re in that part of the house will cause more molecules of moving air to touch you and carry heat away, keeping your body cooler even when the house is the same temperature.
4: Improve Air Circulation
In order to move heat, your air conditioner or heat pump requires good airflow. Clean your air filter regularly. Remove dust from the indoor evaporator coils with gently-applied canned air. And remove dust, dried mud, lawn clippings and more from your outdoor condenser coils with gently-flowing water from your hose.
5: Get Prompt Repairs
If your cooling system breaks down during a heat wave, you’ll be miserable at best, and possibly risking your health at worst. Don’t let that happen to you! At the first sign of a problem, get air conditioner or heat pump repair in Fresno, CA. This will help keep problems small and easy to fix, and ensure that you’ll have the cooling you need when the temperature climbs.
We strive to provide honest answers and solutions to the problems our customers’ experience while remaining highly competitive in price, and offer the fastest turnaround you can find! Contact Donald P. Dick Air Conditioning to schedule service or sign up for Mr. Cool’s Super Saver Program.