Selecting The Central Air Conditioning Your House Needs

Central air conditioning qualifies as the modern age's peak of indoor climate control luxury for the warmer months (or for permanently hot climates such as those found in the American Southwest or Australia's interior). At the touch of a button, you can send cool, refreshing air flooding almost silently into any room of your house, or the whole interior.

In short, you will remain cool and comfortable even if the heat and sunlight outside is enough to make the paint on your home's exterior blister and bring molten tar bubbling out of cracks in the driveway. However, most people who buy a central air conditioning system do so with little knowledge of properly scaling the equipment to their abode, and thus end up paying more than they need to for their summer relief.

Size matters with central air

Several different types of size need to be considered when you are having central air installed in your home, or if you are thinking of replacing an aging system that has served former homeowners (or you) well for many years. In the case of the system as a whole, you do not necessarily want the biggest that you can find. You want to install central air that is of optimum size, not maximum size.

Unless your home is a sprawling villa with fifteen rooms overlooking the hotter portions of Death Valley, you do not need the largest central air conditioner you can find. Consult closely with the installation professionals to get a system that meets your needs rather than exceeding them.

Not only are large systems superfluous and excessively costly, but they suffer from "overkill" - they cool the air so quickly that they shut on and off rapidly, over and over again, because of their thermostat readings in your rooms. This uses more electricity than a smaller unit that runs for a time, then shuts off for a time. Furthermore, this constant, rapid switching on and off will quickly wear out the mechanism, leading to maintenance problems and early, expensive replacement.

Fortunately, there are many high quality small and medium sized central air units on the market today, allowing you choose the one best fitted to efficiently cool your house with maximum comfort and minimum cost. The size of ducts also needs to be calculated properly for the volume of your rooms and their distance from the central unit.

Energy Star central air

The prudent purchaser of central air will not only consider how much cooling their house really needs and scale their purchase to that measure, but will also seek out Energy Star certified central air conditioners when possible. These models have been federally tested and use up to 30% less energy than their standard counterparts - giving you full comfort at a thrifty cost in terms of your power bill.