INDUSTRY INSIGHT
Heating & Air Conditioning
SPONSORED CONTENT
Comfort vs. Efficiency
B
ack in the day, my brother had a Mach 1 Mustang. It was
pure power. Nice comfortable racing seats. Tires didn’t
last long and gas mileage – who cared? Gas was about $.79
per gallon. The car got us where we wanted to go. Today’s
Mustang is still comfortable and gets 2-3 times the gas mileage as its greatgrandfather. Things changed over the years. It may not have the raw,
burn-the-tires-off power, but it is fast and gets us where we want to go, just
in a different way.
When I was a young grandson, I remember sleeping over at my
grandparents’ house. When we woke up in the morning, everyone would
try to squeeze onto the large floor register over the coal furnace. Grandpap
would go down and stoke the furnace. Before long you could feel the
comforting air warming your toes. Good thing coal was cheap because
half the heat went up the chimney. (Why do you think the birds hung out
on the top of the chimneys?)
One day I went there and the old coal furnace was gone, replaced with
a fancy new gas furnace. I think it was replaced more out of convenience
than for efficiency, as Grandpap was getting up in age. The house was still
comfortable but the feeling of the warm register on my feet was now a
memory.
Heating and air conditioning equipment have gone through a lot of
changes over the last 20 years. There were a lot of challenges in all brands
of equipment in the early years of high efficiency. Venting the flue gas,
heat exchanger failing, air conditioning coils leaking and on and on.
One of the comfort challenges was that the air blowing out of the
registers was not as hot in winter and not as cool in the summer. Funny
though, the house was warm in the winter and cool in the summer, just
in a different way. Today’s heating and cooling systems are far superior
in efficiency and comfort to anything in the
past. You still have parts go bad; you always
will. If it’s manmade, it can break, whether it is a
furnace, air conditioner, car or TV.
Today’s equipment needs to be sized and
installed properly. I always say, “The most
important day in the life of a heating and air
conditioning system is the day it is installed.”
Too large and it will not be efficient and will
not stay comfortable. Obviously too small and
This Industry Insight was
you’re not comfortable. When a contractor
measures and sizes your home, it is to ensure the correct size. If your
contractor doesn’t measure and do load calculations to determine
the proper size, show him/her the door. For winter in southwestern
Pennsylvania, the temperature that we design the system for is around 8
degrees. In summer it’s 86 degrees. Most contractors, myself included,
will give a little wiggle room and use 0 degrees for winter and 90 degrees
for summer. For the majority of days, this is fine.
Now comes the winter of January 2014. Temperatures were 15
degrees below zero with 30-degrees-below-zero wind chill. If this was
North Dakota, the furnaces installed would be larger, but we live in
Pennsylvania. It may not be that cold again for five or 10 years. So what’s a
homeowner to do? The worst thing to do is install oversized furnaces and
air conditioners. The oversized equipment will not work efficiently, your
home will not be comfortable, equipment will be more prone to breaking
down and cost more to install in the first place. You could have a couple of
spare electric space heaters for those few real cold days. Sounds like a silly
idea, but it’s not.
The best option is to install a 2-stage furnace or air conditioner.
During the average winter and summer days, it will run in stage 1 with
lower outputs. If it gets extremely cold, like this winter, and as the
Farmer’s Almanac predicts, there is a hotter-than-average summer, it runs
in stage 2, giving more heat or more cooling and keeping you comfortable
and efficient.
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