NEWS  

Comfort Systems - Submitted by Matthew R. Sy

One of the main reasons that I love the heating and air business is that we have the ability to help people. For most business and home owners your heating and air conditioning system is something that we never think of until it breaks down and then it becomes an inconvenience and usually a costly affair.

Technology in heating and cooling has jumped light years into the future over the last five years. There are so many more benefits that we can offer outside of just heating and cooling the spaces that we occupy. We have environmentally friendly and energy efficient units that can literally take your electric or gas bill in half and help offset your monthly budget. Feeling comfortable in your work or home can affect your attitude and disposition.

Advanced Indoor Air Quality systems can reduce indoor air pollution levels drastically and affect our health especially if you have allergies which more and more people do these days. Many times in our industry we come across homeowners that have been taken advantage of. We got involved in such an instance a few weeks ago and were very pleased that we were able to help. A young couple has been doing some remodeling in an older home in downtown Rock Hill. The heating and cooling system needed to be replaced a few years ago and the wife was making most of the decisions while the husband was out fighting in the Iraq war for our country.

As many homeowners do they looked for the best price and another local company installed a Five Ton outdoor system with a mismatched indoor system. Over the last few years they have had nothing but problems, repairs upon repairs and the system always left the humidity levels in the mostly wood floored house extremely high and the living space either too cold or very clammy. When our lead comfort consultant Chris came to their home to look at the problem he ran a complete heat load calculation on their home. This is the first thing that always needs to be done by a proper heating and air company, the load calculation takes in many factors that properly size the heating and cooling equipment for the house and current lifestyles in the home.

 Items that are factored in are the square footage, insulation levels, number of windows and quality of windows, orientation of the home and the number of occupants and appliances including electronics. Chris took all of their homes factors into consideration and found that the home actually needed Three tons of heating and cooling. (They had a five ton installed which is the largest residential unit that is made and is 60K BTU’s; a three ton is 36K BTU’s).

So our investigation found that the system was grossly oversized for their home. Lots of people think bigger is better, with cooling your home oversized equipment outside of improper installation is the absolute worst thing that we could do in our homes. Air Conditioners need to run; they need to run long enough to pull the humidity out of ou homes and businesses. Humidity is as much as a factor to making us feel comfortable as temperature is. When we oversize equipment that cycle off and on too quickly, they cool the house down too fast and then shut off.

This causes unnecessary wear and tear on the equipment and also never allows the system to pull out the humidity from the air and the items in the home. Newer and high efficiency units hardly ever shut down. They are either circulating and cleaning the air or have dropped down into second stage which drops the tonnage or BTU’s of your AC system and basically turns your system in to a dehumidifier that runs at the power level of a hair dryer.

This young couple now has the proper sized equipment in their home and they are very happy with how everything is performing. We gave them a special price to try to help them out considering that they had been taken advantage of in the past and that the man had fought for our country. Everyone here at Comfort Systems was very proud that we could help someone.

It’s great to work for a company that we can help so many people in so many ways. That is something to me that is far greater than salary levels; the fact that you can go home every day and be proud of what you do.