It is another beautiful day today after a wonderful weekend.  The shining sun is out when we go to work in the morning and it is still out when we go home in the evening now.  The weather forecast is for an inch of snow that should melt almost as fast as it lands.  This winter has been a very unusual one.  Be sure to enjoy the rest of this winter; there is no telling when we are going to see something like this again.

Carrier will be having their dealer meeting this Thursday.  They will be showcasing their new furnace line that was developed last year and has been in release over this winter.  Their Aurora furnace is 97% efficient or better depending on the size of the furnace and modulates from 40% of its capacity on up to 100%.  This modulation makes your home much more comfortable and energy efficient.  You provide the exact amount of heat that your home needs to maintain the temperature you desire.  This winter these furnaces will provide excellent value because it has been cool enough that your furnace would need to run occasionally, but not so cold that it would need to run at full capacity very often.

Carrier has a new infinty touch screen user interface control as well that should be coming out this spring.  Their old infinity control was able to offer some of the best control of their equipment that was available.  Their new control has more control, easier interface, and it looks less like a thermostat and more like a picture on your wall.  On the technical side of the control, it will communicate all the pieces of your equipment that communicate to determine the exact status of your system.  This communication can help dial in your system to provide you with that much more comfort and energy savings.

Now if you happen to have an older air conditioning system there is a bit of news that will be important to know.  The EPA has reduced the availability of R-22 refrigerant down from last year's quantity by 47%.  This reduction is in accordance with the phasing out of the R-22 refrigerant that will be complete within the next few years.  You can no longer purchase a new air conditioning system charged with R-22 anymore.  Recharging your old system will cost upwards of 3 times as much this year as last.  Every year it will become more and more expensive to maintain an old R-22 system.  As your system gets older every year, it becomes increasingly wise to purchase a newer air conditioning system.  Increase in efficiencies will save you every time you turn it on.  Availability of the important part, the refrigerant, will make it economical to maintain every year. 

Contact us today to find out how this may affect you. 
952-884-2453
southside@southsideheating.com

Halfway through the month of February brings us to Valentines Day.  My personal Valentines included a nice dinner and a movie.  Dehn's Country Manor makes a wonderful steak dinner and is very reasonably priced. 

This last weekend had us dip down in the cold region again Friday and Saturday.  But even Sunday it was a cold morning.  We have had several service calls that were of the maintenance variety; not having your furnace cleaned up for the winter is what causing the problem.  A properly maintained furnace can still go out during the coming winter, breakdowns do happen, but it eliminates all of the nuisance problems.  Those nuisance problems are the ones that will turn your furnace off while you are at work or during the middle of the night on a weekend.

Lennox still has their winter promotional period on for the rest of this week on purchasing new equipment.  Depending on the age of your furnace and what may be wrong with it; it may be a wiser choice to replace it rather than repair it.  A pressure switch or a flame sensor are smaller items that occasionally go bad and are not so expensive to repair.  A blower motor or an integrated furnace control board are much more expensive and on older furnaces may not be worth replacing just the part.  Also consider that if both your furnace and air conditioner are in the twenty years or older range, they really are both due to be replaced in the near future.  We had a pretty hot and humid summer last year, with no extended winter to speak of; will we start summer earlier this year?  Will it be just as hot or even hotter?  Only time will tell.  It may be wise to think about if your old equipment is up to the challenge of keeping you comfortable in your home while not costing you a lot to do so.

The end of January and beginning of February is usually a pretty good time of the year in Minnesota.  With the coldest month of winter passing we usually have some great snowmobiling, sledding, and ice fishing going on.  We had an excellent football game last night in my opinion; better than the commercials this year.  We have a slow sports month for a couple weeks but March Madness is coming up very quickly. 

Furnace safety is of utmost importance in our cold climate.  A clean furnace filter, which you should have checked this month by now, goes the farthest towards helping your furnace stay safe.  Annual inspections by qualified technicians are another thing that should be done every year, especially on furnaces older than ten years or so.  Safety controls are an important part of every furnace manufactured today to ensure safe operation before anything else.

We are installing a furnace this morning that is replacing a dangerously unsafe furnace.  This furnace is an older furnace that should be checked regularly.  The home is not being lived in full time, but it is checked every couple days to do all the little things that need done like watering the plants, checking the yard, and making sure the heating system is working properly.  The last time the home was checked a wall of heat blasted out the door as the home was opened.  All the plants were dried out and dead.  All the toilets were dried up because the water evaporated.  The veneer on all the wood finishes peeled up.  The studs inside the walls were measured at 120 degrees by the fire department an hour after the furnace was shut down and the entire house was opened up.  This house was dangerously close to catching on fire.

The furnace as a device to heat was working marvelously.  It was pumping out heat like no tomorrow.  It was tragically unsafe however and needed to be red-tagged.  The furnace was not responding to the thermostat controls.  The safety switches inside the furnace are not shutting the furnace off when they get too hot.  A furnace running full blast that long could very possibly have melted a hole into its heat exchanger opening the air stream of the home to the flue gasses.  An unsafe furnace like this one is our job to turn off to protect the lives and property of our customers.  Proper repairs to the furnace or a replacement of it need to be completed before a red tag can be removed.  That is regardless of whom red tags it as well.  We have lost customers to other contractors because they were so mad at us that we shut off their furnace.  Southside has gained other customers because they wanted us to do their repairs or replacement.  A red tagged furnace is a very serious issue and needs to be handled in the proper way, no matter who handles it for you.

If you have any questions please contact us at 952-884-2453 and we can provide you with answers and information.

Search engines are a wonderful thing; you can find just about anything you want.  Google, Bing, Yahoo, or any of the other engines give an amazing amount of results for whatever you happen to be looking for.  They do such a good job, they will tell you when you are spelling something wrong and that what you are really looking for is spelled this way.  Sometimes what you want though is not what you really should get.

Our service techs have been on many service calls this winter for furnaces that were installed by the cheapest guys out there.  Fly by nights, friends of friends, a guy I know, and I can install this furnace I got on Craig's list are some of the popular ways to install a furnace.  Saving a few hundred dollars like this is really not too smart of a thing to do.  We were on one just recently where "a guy that does this" installed a furnace.  We found 2 code violations, 2 more poor installation practices, and a grossly oversized furnace installed for a couple hundred dollars less than what we charge.  Of course a permit was not pulled to ensure the city can come and inspect the job to make sure it was done properly and safely.  Any warranty the furnace had is voided unless you can find a very generous contractor that can has a wonderful relationship with his supplier.  The oversized furnace actually heats the home slower than a properly sized furnace.  It gets too hot and turns itself off every couple of minutes.  This overheating not only takes longer to heat your home, but it also shortens the life of the furnace significantly by doubling or even tripling the number of start ups it will go through in its lifetime.  A weakening of the heat exchanger also happens when you overheat the furnace repeatedly creating a dangerous condition of cracks in your heat exchanger.  Cracks are an extremely dangerous situation that causes exhaust fumes to enter into your home. 

The other side of getting your furnace installed by someone working out of the back of his pickup truck is that you get a questionable furnace.  If it is a brand name furnace; did it fall off a truck somewhere?  Was it damaged in some way?  If it is an off brand furnace, how good is it really?  Parts may say that they are warrantied for 5 years, but if you have a technician out 3 times a year changing parts, is it really worth that?  Will that furnace last more than 5-7 years?  If you go on vacation to Disneyland for 2 weeks for winter vacation, can you trust the furnace to not go out the day after you leave? 

When you think about installing a new furnace, think about what it will cost you for 10 years.  The price difference from a multiple stage furnace to a single stage furnace will typically take about 2 years to make up the cost difference.  A variable speed furnace will save the difference in electricity over those same two years.  A quality furnace installed properly will last well over 15 years; typically we see 20-25 years of life on average.  Spend just a little bit more today and save yourself money for 20 years.  The other option is to save money today and pay for it for many years yet to come.

We all knew winter would make its presence felt, and it finally has.  The roads are icy, the lawns are snow covered, and the furnaces are working full steam ahead.  It may be too late to really save the ice fishing year, but maybe we can get enough to have a couple good runs on the snowmobiles.

I was in Iowa last week visiting the Lennox manufacturing plant in Marshalltown.  It was an extremely impressive plant.  They have 1 million square feet under one roof where they not only produce the equipment but also test all their lines.  The attention to detail is what I was most excited to see.  They scan each part as they move along their production run to ensure it is the correct part in the correct piece of equipment on the correct production order.  They not only test all of their equipment to the most stringent outside source guidelines, such as UL or AGA, but they have even more exact testing procedures to ensure everything is assembled to the hundred thousandth of an inch in exactness.  They have a division whose sole purpose is to measure every mold, every die, and every purchased piece to ensure that exactness.  Should anything ever be seen to be off in its exactness, the piece goes back to be redone. 

Lennox has kicked off its winter rebate program starting today.  All of the federal tax credit for high efficient energy improvements gone except for solar or geothermal credit.  Interestingly enough, the signature series of Lennox air conditioners and heat pumps are all solar ready.  They also have a solar panel package that will reduce your dependence on your electrical supplier by producing electricity to be used in your home as long as the sun is out.  Call us today at 952-884-2453 to ask about the rebates on replacing your equipment.  The program goes on until February 17th, but why wait to start lowering your utility costs until then?

If everything is sized correctly and your equipment is in reasonably good repair, nothing is too dirty; your air conditioner should lower the temperature of your home by 1 degree per hour.  That is also on days that are closer to 85 than 105.  Air conditioners are designed to maintain a temperature, not bring a temperature down.  Walk in coolers are designed to keep things cold in that way, but if you have ever walked into one, you know they are cave-like in feel, they are cold and damp.  When you are sitting around in your home enjoying your air conditioning, you do not want that damp feel.  If your air conditioner keeps up well during the 85-90 degrees days and your home is comfortable, chances are your system is installed correctly and sized properly.  If it does not, your system may be undersized or not cooling correctly.  If it seems to be running for shorter lengths of time, 5 minutes or shorter, it may be oversized for your heat load.  What you have your thermostat set for in most cases will not have any affect on how fast it cools.  If you have a multi stage air conditioner a lower temperature will cause it to go into hi-cooling faster.  If you have a single stage air conditioner, and the vast majority are, it is either on or off.  The only difference having your thermostat set for 62 or 74 when your home is 76 will be how excited you get watching the thermostat.  Both settings will cool at the same speed, as will any number you have it set for.  Set your thermostat at the temperature you are comfortable at, and leave it there until fall. 

"My old air conditioner cooled my house from 85 to 72 in under an hour and this new one doesn't" is a common complaint.  Your old air conditioner was set up to cool your home and its efficiency was not a care at all.  Today, your air conditioner should be sized to the heat load of your home and it needs to be a minimum efficiency of at least a 13 SEER.  The refrigerant used is also a new chemical, R-410a now instead of r-22.  R-22 has chemicals that cause ozone depletion while r-410a is much more environmentally safe.  New furnaces with variable speed drives get even more efficient by optimizing your air flow in the system.  This increase in efficiency will save your pocketbook but it also increases the time it takes to cool your home. 

The temperature drop across a cooling coil should be 20 degrees.  That means if you take an air temperature reading at your filter and one in the ductwork just above the cooling coil there should be a difference of 20 degrees.  Any more differance and your coil could get too cold and freeze up.  Also you are using more electricity to cool than is needed, causing a loss in efficiency.  As the day gets hotter the pressures in your system will increase causing an increase in electrical consumption, but the temperature difference should maintain at 20 degrees.  The amount of cooling being produced should be the same but the amount of cooling required to cool the home will increase.  After 95 degrees, a properly sized air conditioner will actually not keep up with the heat load of the house.  If the temperature difference is less than 15 degrees, then you are not providing enough cooling to cool your home.

Your outdoor condenser unit can really go on any side of the house.  What you want to have though, if possible, is to make sure it is not in the direct sun during the hottest part of the day.  The outdoor condenser is where the heat from your home is dissipated to the outdoor air, it must work much harder to get rid of that heat if it is already in the hottest part of the outdoors.  A shady spot is the best place to set the condenser unit, but again care must be taken.  You need to be able to access the unit for servicing is the primary concern for maintaining the unit.  Occasional washings need to be done to make sure it has the proper air flow to get rid of the heat.  Also, make sure there is a minimum clearance of twelve inches all around the unit so that the outdoor air has a chance to flow evenly across the condenser coil.  Taking care of your air conditioner by proper placement and maintenance is the best way for your air conditioner to take care of cooling your home in an economical fashion.

Something has gone wrong with your air conditioner, either over the winter or from last summer that was never addressed.  Google and the other search engines are lighting up with these and more search phrases.  Call us if you have any questions, 952-884-2453, if it is something that just got bumped and is a quick fix we can sometimes do over the phone.  If you need a service tech we can schedule one.  Try not to wait until it is 3:30 and approaching 90 degrees out, we would love to help you out then but just like every other heating and cooling company out there we will be busy looking at air conditioners that aren't running.  We have a cool couple of cool days coming up, if you have done nothing yet for a broken ac or haven't started it at all this year, test it out and see if you will be ok for the next hot run. 

Absolutely, however care must be taken to do it properly.  You can install air conditioners in the winter even though it isn't very fun being the guy that does the outside work on those days.  Where you need to be careful is in the proper charging of the unit.  Depneding on the manufacturer of the unit, you need to have 60-70 degree minimum outdoor temperature to get an accurate pressure reading with a system operating on the r-410a refrigerant.  Some units have an upper limit of 95-105 degrees as well.  When testing a system for an electrical rebate the outdoor temperature must be within these operating temperature for an accurate test and a quick rebate(or any rebate at all).  Also, care must be taken when installing these types of units because moisture in the lines will cause acid to form ruining your system in the first few years of operation.  Proper procedures have been created by each manufacturer again to make sure that any moisture in the system is removed before any refrigerant is added.