HVAC Information For Homeowners

Worst of all, every so often the AC unit makes an unsettling banging sound due to its age and daily wear and tear

For about four months now I have been running my own podcast. I honestly never thought that this would be something that would take off. I really thought that I was just going to make a few episodes before I got frustrated and gave up on the whole venture. However, I’ve been extremely surprised at the reception of my silly little radio show. Let me be clear that I have no idea what I’m doing and I don’t have expensive equipment for my podcast. Sometimes I think that people appreciate the grassroots nature of my publication… Until people start complaining about my central heating and cooling system. Recently I was checking out the reviews and I noticed that there were quite a few which mentioned my indoor air handling devices. Apparently, because I’m recording the podcast in the comfort of my home you can hear my air conditioning system clicking on and off in the background. Every time the cooling system kicks into gear there is a loud disruption on the recording. As the air conditioning unit continues to pump high-quality treated indoor air through my vents you can actually hear the sound of the air in my ductwork. Worst of all, every so often the AC unit makes an unsettling banging sound due to its age and daily wear and tear. I know that I should call a professional heating and cooling technician to take care of these assorted air quality problems, but I’m not making money from my podcast yet. I love making my radio show but I am getting tired of people making fun of my indoor air handling devices without contributing new ones.

 

a/c care program

I really can’t imagine being a kid these days.

Everything is completely different than it was when I was growing up. I’m not just saying this as an old curmudgeon, so much as I’m making legitimate observations about the state of the world and modern parenting. If you go into public these days you are hard-pressed to find a child who isn’t staring at some kind of screen. It seems like toddlers have their own cell phones and iPads to keep them entertained when their parents are too tired. I can’t imagine any of this. When I was growing up, my brothers and I had to make our own entertainment. Sometimes it even included the indoor air handling devices because we were so bored. I remember many days when we used the central thermostat device as a pretend rocket control system and got yelled at by my mom for changing all of the indoor air handling control settings. I also remember climbing all over the air conditioning unit outside before my mom would scream at us for denting the cooling systems external shell. The one thing we could do with the HVAC system that never resulted in punishment was playing telephone through the air vents. Because we had a central heating and cooling system, we utilized extensive air ducts to channel the high quality indoor air throughout the house. These metal channels were perfect for kids to scream through from different rooms in the house. We would often remove our air vents and hold the secret conversations through the ductwork. These days, kids have actual telephones to play with.

air vent

I knew that this was going to be a rough year when I started reading my astrology.

Every astrologer that I checked into was telling their readers to buckle up for difficult times in 2020.

I truly believe their predictions about the world and changing circumstances in our lives, so I was ready for whatever was coming next. Unfortunately, I wasn’t prepared for my son to lose his house and wind up staying at mine. The day that my son told me he needed a place to live I realized I was going to have to change a lot about my living circumstances. Namely, my heating and cooling system was going to need a full overhaul. If he was going to come stay in the house with me I was going to need more powerful indoor air quality control devices to handle the extra load. My son is extremely particular about his indoor air temperature. He is also extremely smelly and requires a lot of additional air filtration. Thank God, I came up with a better idea than renovating my entire central heating and cooling system. I decided to set up a guest suite for my son so he could control his own indoor air temperature control settings and leave my central HVAC system alone. I was able to easily convert the garage into a second living space, complete with its own indoor air handling controls. All I needed was a mini split ductless heating and cooling system to control the indoor air quality in the separate space. Now, my son is living comfortably in his own indoor air and I don’t have to worry about his smelly effects on my living situation.
live link

I guess I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to sit still.

By this, I mean that I always need to be engaged and accomplishing something or else I feel like I’m wasting my life.

I am not the type of person who will sit around and zone out on the couch in front of the TV all day. The thought of that makes my skin crawl and I get restless leg syndrome immediately. I always want to be working on something meaningful which means that I have a lot of diverse hobbies and activities in my life. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to contain all of these activities under one roof. When you have a central heating and cooling system you only get one temperature control for the entire home. I can go to the thermostat and I can turn on the cooling system or the heating system. I can have one consistent temperature throughout the entire house. Unfortunately, that’s not what I need when I have stagnant activities and heat building activities to accomplish all day long. That’s why I had a zone controlled heating and cooling system installed in my house. Now, I have separate zones of comfort for my extremely distinct activities each day. If I want to sit down and just sew I can have a nice warm indoor air quality to keep my fingers from freezing up. If I feel like working out I can decrease the air temperature in that space so I can properly work up a sweat. It’s difficult being such a busy bee but my new zone control heating and cooling system helps keep me comfortable with all the buzzing.

 

climate control

You have to be careful who you agree to spend time with.

I feel like I am too trusting when it comes to other human beings and it often gets me into hot water.

Or, extremely hot and miserable camping experiences. This was the case last summer when I agreed to go on a large camping trip with some people who I didn’t know very well. To be honest, they seemed a little bit over the top when getting to know them… But I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt. When they invited me on a beautiful camping trip in the mountains, I thought that I heard judge them too harshly in the beginning. I showed up at our camping spot on the agreed date and was desperately searching for their vehicle. That’s when they told me that they had rented a massive RV. Apparently, rather than camping they would be spending most of their time inside the brand new, temperature controlled recreational vehicle. Of course, I had no idea that they intended to utilize modern air conditioning for the entire camping trip. They sat inside of the huge RV and operated a backup generator for power which energized the large air conditioning system inside. All day, they basked in the comfort of the central cooling device and occasionally poked their heads out for a minute or two to ask about the progress that I made building a fire. The whole camping trip was swelteringly hot and humid, and I had absolutely no help with the outdoor tasks. I suppose I could have retreated to their indoor air conditioned haven so cool down for a minute or two, but I refused to step foot in their modern AC monstrosity out of principle. Never again.

radiant heater

Sometimes it can be utterly shocking how people survive to reach an adult age when they clearly should have died off years ago.

I don’t want to sound cold or overly harsh, but it is incredible how stupid humans can be.

Somehow, they continue surviving despite it all. I happen to think that this is usually their parents’ fault for teaching them so little earlier in life. You really aren’t doing your kids any favors when you don’t let them do their own laundry, make their own food, or learn about energy bills on their own. This was exactly what happened with my most recent tenant when she answered my Craigslist ad. I was nervous for a younger person to move into my apartment, but I didn’t realize that she could be unaware of how utility bills work. For the first month that she lived in my rented apartment, I saw that the energy bill was climbing higher and higher each day. I kept providing her updates on the estimated energy bill as I saw it reaching astronomical levels. Clearly, she was using the central heating and cooling system to an extreme degree and had no idea how much money she was going to owe the energy company at the end of the month. I wanted her to understand how expensive it was to utilize a massive HVAC system before she drove herself into a hole. Unfortunately, apparently she had no idea what I was talking about when I kept bringing up the energy bill. For some reason, she thought that energy was included in the rent, and I was simply providing her unnecessary updates on my energy company receipts. When the end of the month rolled around and she was liable for $500 in energy expenses, you’d better believe she called idiot-enabling daddy for help right away.

 

heating dealership

Sometimes people ask me about my most recent ex and I just have to shake my head. It’s not worth recounting all of the terrible ways that he tried to torture me. People generally want to believe that he was a good guy. No matter what I say, their response is something along the lines of “he seemed so nice!” That’s when I tell them about all of the stunts but he pulled while I was trying to move out of his house. I was simply trying to gather my belongings and get out of his way so we could move on, and he made sure that my blood would be boiling the entire time. Literally. I finally was given permission to get my stuff from his house in the middle of the burning hot southern summer. Where I live, the summer is marked with absurd heat and humidity day in and day out. You have to operate a central cooling system if you want to be safe or comfortable in your own home. Of course, when I arrived at his house to start packing my things on a particularly warm and muggy day, I found that he had disabled the thermostat so that I would be tortured with heat inside the house. He had locked the smart thermostat so I couldn’t adjust the indoor air quality in any way. Without having a cooling system chugging away to pump ice cold air into the house, it was at least 95 degrees in there. Thank God, one of my good friends came over to help and knew a thing or two about thermostat wiring. He quickly popped the thermostat off the wall and directly wired the air conditioning system to the power source. For the next two days, we continually ran the air conditioning system at full blast. The whole time, I chuckled that my nasty ex had finally lost this energetic battle.

hydronic heater

Just last week we were on the verge of adopting a new animal.

We decided it was time to go ahead and get a new pet in our house because it was feeling rather empty and sad for the past several weeks.

We didn’t want the kids to be in mourning forever, after we had clearly lost our family pets. You see, for many years we have owned the single cat who enjoyed going indoors and out. We never had a problem with letting her wander around the neighborhood for the afternoon, so it was rather shocking on the day that she didn’t return back home. Finally, last week we decided that it was time to adopt a new kitten so we could all move on. That’s right about when my cat reappeared, clearly having emerged from the open air vent behind our dryer. At first, it seems like she materialized out of nowhere until I took a closer look and realized that the central heating and cooling system was to blame. Specifically, our extensive ductwork was the reason for our missing cat. She had popped out of the laundry room where we rely on an overhead exhaust fan to remove the steaming air from our space. We plugged up the ductwork that went to this room many years ago, because it was a waste of our expensive treated indoor air. I began investigating the walls and moved the dryer out of the way at some point. When I moved the clothing appliance out of the way, there was a gaping hole in the wall where our air vent cover should have been. I found chunks of hair stuff to the open ventilation hole and inside of the ductwork. Clearly, our wily cat had been escaping from the ice cold central cooling system by hiding in the warm ductwork created by the dryer. Man, I’m so glad that we didn’t get another cat.

hybrid hvac system

Sometimes you try to help people and only make the situation worse.

This is absolutely the case when it comes to just about anything having to do with my grandma.

She wants to live independently and be on her own, but she’s also extremely needy and incapable of taking care of things by herself. The other day, she was complaining so much about her indoor air quality that I decided it was a good idea to call out a professional heating and cooling technician to give her a hand. Rather than having them install all new heating and cooling devices, I wanted them to link up a smart thermostat to her existing air conditioner and forced air furnace. I figured this was the best way to determine if she had an actual indoor air temperature control problem or if she was just mis-managing her thermostat settings. I installed the smart thermostat app on my phone and began to monitor her indoor air quality control equipment usage. Well, this was a massive mistake. My grandma refuses to learn how to use her smart thermostat that was promptly installed in her house. She says the newfangled device is just too confusing for her to even touch it. This means she’s calling me day in and day out to adjust her indoor air temperature for her, based on her every whim. Whenever we speak, she traps me in a conversation for at least 30 minutes about her brown neighbors and government conspiracies. I’m growing exhausted with the constant racist phone calls from my grandma and I wish that I had never installed this central temperature control unit at all.

 

air conditioning repair

Nobody needs anything extra to worry about these days.

Obviously, our world seems to be burning right now.

Every time I turn on the news I am being flooded with horror stories of climbing case numbers and political unrest. It’s difficult to know where to focus my attention because there are so many terrible things to concentrate on at the moment. That’s why we really weren’t excited when we noticed that we were going to need a professional HVAC inspection on top of it all. It had been a long couple of months trapped in the house together with two children. It definitely didn’t help when we started noticing that the indoor air temperature was fluctuating wildly throughout the day. There were uneven hot and cold patches throughout the entire house and it seems like the air temperature switched between hot and cold depending on the moment. I realized that there had to be some kind of problem with our HVAC equipment or duct work. I really didn’t want to call out a professional heating and cooling technician because it would cost us money and potentially our health. When I finally pulled the trigger and got an HVAC professional to our home, it only took him five minutes to figure out what was going on with the central heating and cooling system. Apparently, my kids have gotten bored enough during their shelter in place order to start using the air ducts as a form of entertainment. They were passing their toys back and forth through the air vents that connected their rooms, and in the process, they had lost a few. The HVAC technician pulled out several stuffed animals from our air ducts, and our uneven air temperatures cleared right up.

air conditioning worker

It’s funny how people who are prepared are often labeled as crazy.

Whenever I’m watching Doomsday Preppers, I understand that the people seemed sort of insane…

But maybe they’re really the smartest of us all. At least, this has been my experience when it comes to worrying about indoor air quality and purification. For the past 20 years or so I’ve been quite concerned about managing my indoor air quality because I realized how many nasty airborne contaminants were flowing through my house each day. I lived in a metropolitan area and I would often see all of the dirt and grime that fell out of our outdoor breathing air. I didn’t want any of that nasty toxicity coming into my home, so I began investing in high quality air management devices. At the time, people thought that I was a little bit wild for installing an air purification system that worked in tandem with my central heating and cooling system. They thought that it was going overboard when I tried to remove airborne contaminants such as mold, mildew, and harmful chemicals. When HEPA air filters were available on the residential HVAC market, people acted like I was completely in the wrong for upgrading my air filters to effectively remove over 99% of unwanted airborne toxins. Well, look where we are now. People are suddenly scrambling to install air purification systems just like the one that I’ve been operating for over 20 years. Suddenly, HEPA air filters are a completely normal way to manage your indoor air quality. I guess I was ahead of the times, or I was just so crazy that I created a global pandemic.

cooling workman