Snellville Heating, Air and Plumbing Blog: Archive for the ‘Air Conditioning’ Category

Runaway AC! Why Your Air Conditioner Won’t Turn Off

Monday, July 26th, 2021

blown-awayWhen your air conditioner won’t come on in the middle of the summer, you have a problem. Possibly a big problem that will make it necessary to call for professional air conditioning service in Winder, GA. But what happens when your AC won’t turn off? If you’re in the middle of a hot day, you might think, “Sounds like a great problem to have!” Trust the HVAC pros, this is not a good situation. An AC that won’t shut down will mean a house that is too cold, an AC that wears down fast, and extremely high bills. 

So let’s talk about the runaway AC. If you currently have this problem, you can put an immediate stop to it by shutting off the circuit breaker for the air conditioner at the electrical panel. This at least will stop the drain on energy and your house from turning into an igloo while you get professional help to find out what’s wrong. We’ll take a look below at some possible causes of the AC that won’t shut off.

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Why Your AC Might Be Leaking Water

Monday, June 28th, 2021

waterWe’ve talked before about the problem of refrigerant leaks in air conditioners and how you can detect them early so you can call us for AC repair in Covington, GA. But more than refrigerant can leak out of your air conditioning system. Your AC can leak water as well.

You might think, “Wait, the AC doesn’t use water to cool down the air. It uses refrigerant.” First, take some pride in your HVAC knowledge—we hope this means you read our earlier blog! Second, you correctly identified that an AC doesn’t use water for cooling. But an air conditioner does create water as a byproduct of how it works, and its design allows it to remove this water from the cabinet and out of the house. If you listen to your air conditioner as it runs, you’ll occasionally hear the sound of water. That’s AC removing water through its condensate system. When this condensate system malfunctions, it leads to water leaks.

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Your AC Has Cooling Limits—Let’s Talk About That

Tuesday, June 1st, 2021

thermostat-and-woman-72-degreesThe modern electro-mechanical air conditioner is a marvel of technology: a device that provides cool comfort to a building on a hot day just by circulating refrigerant to move heat from the indoor air, then distributing that air around the rooms. 

Of course, the word just is doing the heavy lifting in that sentence, since air conditioning systems are complex and precise devices where many components must work in conjunction to create the cooling a house enjoys.

And that cooling has limits. You probably know that the AC keeping your home an oasis of relaxation doesn’t have infinite cooling power—it can’t make the house as cold as a freezer, even if you did want that. We’re going to use this post to look at what the cooling limits of your air conditioning in Athens, GA actually are.

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The Dangers of Leaking AC Refrigerant

Monday, May 3rd, 2021

resiidential-ac-unitPeople who aren’t in the HVAC industry often have misconceptions about how air conditioning systems work, specifically the role of refrigerant. Homeowners often imagine that refrigerant is a fuel for the air conditioner, something that will eventually run out and need to be refilled. 

Refrigerant is not a fuel source. Air conditioning systems run on one type of energy: electricity. A refrigerant is a heat transfer medium. It’s what allows an air conditioner to pump heat from a house to the outside. The refrigerant works, in some ways, like blood in the human body: a pump circulates it to allow the system to run. But if the human body loses blood, it creates more. If an air conditioning system loses refrigerant, it can’t create more and will be in serious danger until it receives professional AC repair in Lawrenceville, GA.

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The Biggest Ways Air Conditioning Maintenance Benefits You

Monday, April 5th, 2021

air-conditioner-condenser-3D-renderEach spring, we recommend our customers arrange for professional maintenance to inspect and tune-up their air conditioning systems. Although it’s a “recommendation,” we don’t think of maintenance as just a beneficial service—it’s a necessary one if you want your air conditioner to have the longest service life with the fewest problems and lowest operating costs possible. 

We’re not the only people making this recommendation. The US Department of Energy urges all homeowners to have annual maintenance for their air conditioner. And there’s no better time for the job than spring, right before the hot weather arrives.

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Grading Your AC at the End of the Season

Monday, September 21st, 2020

service-checkmarkYour air conditioning system attends a type of summer school. You want to make sure your air conditioner performs the best work during each summer, otherwise it’s time to either have the AC repaired or maybe replaced.

We recommend you give your air conditioning system a report card during the fall. A simple grade for how well it did over the previous summer. This will help you choose what to do about it during the cooler season and if you need the assistance of an Athens, GA HVAC contractor to help with the future of cooling in your house.

Think about the cooling in your house during the summer, and then give your air conditioning system a grade, from “A” to “F.”

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No, You Don’t Need to “Top Off” the AC’s Refrigerant in Late Summer

Monday, September 7th, 2020

Your air conditioning system has gone through plenty this summer. The hot weather isn’t done yet, so you might have concerns about the AC’s continuing performance with all the stress it’s accumulated. It’s easy to make the mistake of thinking your air conditioner needs more refrigerant, at least “topped-off,” so it can get through the rest of the hot weather.

This is not true, and if you hear someone who claims to be an HVAC technician tell you it’s time for more refrigerant, run the opposite direction! There’s only one situation where you’ll need more refrigerant put into an AC, and it’s a repair job, not routine maintenance.

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Hot Spots in Your House? Here Are 5 Reasons Why

Monday, August 24th, 2020

woman-and-fanA central air conditioning system is designed to send air around the living spaces in a house to create an even spread of cooling. It won’t be perfect, as some rooms are harder to cool than others because of conditions like sun-exposure. But you’ll have a good idea of what your house feels like when the AC is on and working the way it should.

When the cooling turns uneven and you start noticing true “hot spots” in the house, it may mean you need air conditioning repair in Lawrenceville, GA. You will at least want an HVAC pro to take a look at the system to see why your cooling isn’t at the peak of its summer game. Below we’ve listed five common causes for hot spots in homes:

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What You Can Do If Your Air Conditioner Suddenly Fails

Friday, July 17th, 2020

flushed-man-in-front-of-fanAn air conditioning system that either stops sending around cool air or stops sending around any air at all is a serious problem during a hot Georgia summer. You may be enjoying the day indoors, and then abruptly your home’s temperature is rising toward tropical heatwave levels.

What can you do? First, don’t get panicked—there is help available, and it’s not far away. You can call us for AC repair in Lawrenceville, GA and elsewhere in the Snellville, GA area and we’ll see you receive prompt service to have the trouble fixed. However, before you make the call, you can take a number of steps to see if you actually have a repair issue. Troubleshooting the AC may reveal a small error you can correct on your own.

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Why Air Quality is Often Bad in Homes Like Yours

Monday, July 13th, 2020

microbes-floating-due-to-low-indoor-air-qualitySo you’ve realized that you have poor indoor air quality in your home and you’re just not getting it—what in the world is going on? You take good care of your home, you take the extra effort to make it look nice on top of keeping it clean, and you feel like your indoor air quality should be good because of this, right?

Unfortunately, this just isn’t the case. Indoor air quality is a tricky thing and it has some often unexpected variables that contribute to it. If you need to improve your indoor air quality, we’d like to recommend an air purifier in Lawrenceville, GA. We’ll unpack this more below, but an air purifier can meet the needs of almost any resident here.

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