Proudly Serving Central West Florida
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.
Mold causes a number of health issues, including respiratory problems, allergic reactions, and can even cause property damage if left unchecked. Mold grows in small damp spaces devoid of any light, and that perfect breeding ground for mold growth could be your AC ductwork.
Mold impacts air quality for everyone in your home. Let’s discuss how you can find out if your AC has mold and what you can do about it. You may just have to schedule AC repair in Tampa, FL if it’s bad enough.
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?
We’ve talked before about the warning sounds from an air conditioner that will tell you when it’s time to call our technicians for AC repair in Tampa, FL. Strange and unusual noises coming from any part of a split system air conditioner are a reason for concern, and the faster you move to have the AC inspected and repaired, the less risk of the air conditioning system suddenly breaking down or developing a more expensive repair issue.
But “strange” and “unusual” are relative—what do they actually mean? We can describe these noises to you, but we can also describe the sounds you should expect to hear from an air conditioning system when it’s running as it should. So to put a positive spin on AC repairs, here are the customary noises you’ll hear from your air conditioner this summer when it’s doing the job you need from it.
One of the common warning signs of a problem with a central air conditioning system is when it starts to create weird sounds. But hearing isn’t the only sense you can use to notice an AC in trouble. Your sense of smell can also alert you. An air conditioner that’s blowing strange scents into your house through the vents is sending up a warning flag that you may need to call our technicians for central air conditioning in Tampa, FL.
If you’re currently noticing a strange AC smell, we can help you try to narrow down what it means. Please don’t try any repairs on your own—leave the diagnosis and solutions to our professionals.
One of the difficulties we face with air conditioners in Florida is that they don’t get lengthy breaks. The standard for air conditioners in most of the country is a steady summer of use, shorter periods of use in spring and fall, and then a winter where they may not turn on at all. But we need to have our ACs ready to work all through the year, and this means they take on a lot more stress.
As winter gets nearer, you may run into an air conditioner that’s starting to struggle to keep the house cool on warm days. This might be the result of the strain on the air conditioner, or it could be a malfunction. We’ll look at what you can do when you have an AC that isn’t living up to expectations.
Any metal that comes into contact with water in the presence of oxygen can rust. So the short answer to the question in the title is, yes. Rust on an AC is more likely to happen in a place like coastal Florida because of our high humidity and the amount of salt in the air. The outdoor components of your home’s air conditioning system are in regular contact with moisture and salt, and this can lead to parts of it rusting.
The good news is that AC manufacturers build their systems to resist rust for many years. It can still occur, however, and we’re going to take a look at what can happen when you’ve got a rusty AC and what you can do about it.
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.
One of the best ways you can discover that it’s time to call us for AC repair in Palm Harbor, FL is by listening for unusual sounds coming from the air conditioner’s cabinets. These warning sounds include rattling, creaking, hissing, bubbling, shrieking, and screeching.
But what about the sound of water dripping? This is a normal noise you can expect to hear from your AC, but we’ve found that people are a bit confused about why they hear water inside their air conditioners. ACs don’t use water to cool down the air, so where is this water coming from?
We’re going to answer this question, not just because it’s an interesting bit of trivia, but because it will help you understand the condensate drainage system of your AC. This information can come in handy in the future if the cooling system malfunctions.
