Serving Pinellas, Pasco, and Hillsborough Counties
Your air conditioner goes up against a lot of stress year after year. It’s wear and tear—slow degradation that you can’t stop or halt. As that happens, repairs pop up, and it’s not always easy to identify when your AC does need to be fixed. That’s what we want to help you with right now.
Before you call for AC repair in Clearwater FL, let’s talk about the main signals from your AC that it’ll send you before it breaks down. We’ll run through those first.
Short cycling is an immediate sign that something is wrong with your air conditioner. It doesn’t matter what the cause is: it’s bad news. But when your AC freezes up, that comes with different problems than a simple power-related issue.
Before you get air conditioning repair in Clearwater, let’s walk you through how you can tell if your AC is frozen or not. If all goes well, the solution to your problem could be right here.
While it’s important to get your AC checked out after it’s frozen up like that, these fixes should give you peace of mind in the meantime.
Your air conditioner works overtime to keep you cool when you need it and beat the heat of Tampa during the blazing summer months. Right now it’s cool enough that it has a bit of downtime. That gives you the perfect opportunity to see how it’s doing before you need to heavily rely on it next season.
It’s time to do a wellness check on your AC to determine whether you need AC repair in Clearwater, FL, or if you’re A-okay until next season. Let’s find out.
Each summer, your AC goes on a long endurance run as it battles to remove heat from your home. Did it just run its last course and maybe needs to quit?
Because, let’s face it, this was a rough summer to be a cooling system in Florida. Too much heat, too much humidity. A newer AC installation in Clearwater, FL is probably in decent shape and ready for more heat next year (provided it has its annual maintenance appointment in spring). An aging AC may be looking at a wobbly future unless repaired—or even replaced. How can you tell if this summer was too much for your cooling system?
What does allergy season mean? You’ve probably experienced what it feels like—sneezing, congestion, eye and nose irritation. But why does it happen when it does? The reason is that as the weather begins warming up in spring, it increases the bloom of several plants that send pollen into the air, most notably ragweed. Allergy season can be extremely serious in Florida, and it often strikes early because our winter season is short.
What are the best ways to deal with allergy season in your home? Believe it or not, your local HVAC pros here at the A/C Guy of Tampa Bay have ways to ease your allergy season burdens. We’ll get into more details below.
We’re getting more cold weather this season than usual for Florida, so we hope you remembered to have annual heater service in Clearwater, FL through our maintenance plan. (If you haven’t, it’s not too late to sign up!) Maintenance can stop the majority of heater malfunctions, but not all of them. You may run into that most dreaded of all heating problems: a heater that won’t turn on.
When this happens, you don’t need to panic. If your furnace or heat pump needs professional repairs, all you have to do is call The A/C Guy of Tampa Bay and we’ll see the problem is fixed. Before you call us, however, you can go through several troubleshooting steps. The heating system may not have as big a problem as it at first seems, and going through these checks may get the system working again.
When Thermostats Go Bad!
Sounds a touch dramatic, but we want to make a point about how important your home’s thermostat is for the overall operation of your HVAC system. The thermostat affects comfort, energy consumption, and the health of the AC and heater. Thermostat problems often look like other HVAC troubles, and it takes a skilled professional to make an accurate diagnosis of the malfunction and fix it.
We’ve listed below ways a thermostat can malfunction and how it affects your house and AC (as well as the general HVAC system).
Earlier this year, we wrote a post about the cooling limits of an air conditioning system in a home. This is called the temperature differential of an AC, which is how much the air conditioner can lower the indoor temperature compared to the outside. The temperature differential for residential ACs is 20°F.
Of course, this doesn’t mean every air conditioner can work the same for every house. A small air conditioner may be able to lower the temperature by 20°F, but for only a limited area. This is the air conditioner’s capacity, which is separate from the temperature differential. The capacity of an air conditioner is how many BTUs of heat it can remove from a house in an hour. For example, a small window AC can remove about 5,000 BTUs/hour from a space, but this is only enough to cool down a single room. Larger central ACs can remove 12,000 to 60,000 BTUs/hour.
The end of this winter season is extremely harsh for some parts of the country. Here in Tampa Bay, it’s standard late-winter-as-usual, which means the spring warmth is already arriving and many of us can expect to start using our air conditioning systems. As the season of heating comes to a close, it’s a good time to assess how efficiently your heating system performed.
It may seem hard to know that, especially when heating systems don’t do as much work during our mild winters compared to more northern states. But there are ways you can analyze your heating system’s efficiency and judge whether you need heating service in Clearwater, FL to improve it.
Heat pumps are wonderful devices, especially in warmer climates like we get to enjoy here in Tampa Bay. A heat pump can deliver all the cooling a home needs through the long and hot seasons, and then switch over to energy-saving heating during the short periods of cooler weather. It’s all there in one system, and it can make a difference in energy costs compared to using a combination of an AC and an electric or even gas furnace.
But this marvel of comfort technology can still malfunction. Whether you have your heat pump in heating or cooling mode, it still operates in a fashion similar to an air conditioner and can encounter the same types of malfunctions as an AC. Many of these malfunctions make specific noises that will give you a warning that it’s time to call us for cooling/heating repair in Clearwater, FL.