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Call toll free 1-866-584-0355 or 1-903-759-2160 or fax 903 759 4605
309 Patriot Circle, Longview, TX 75604-2240
The utility bill is too high.
Most of the things that might be your problems
can be checked fairly easily, but some are going to take some effort.
Attic air can get into the return air from walls around the unit, holes
in walls or the platform. Remember that the return "sucking" of
air creates a vacuum in the area near the unit. A door to the closet that
doesn't seal well or that is smaller than the frame opening or is louvered can let
lots of attic air be pulled into the system.
| DO NOT SEAL THE CEILING OF A GAS FURNACE CLOSET.
This is the way the appliance gets oxygen to burn.
It is an opening for COMBUSTION AIR and it is essential that the air around
the furnace breath into and out of the attic. The closet is just an extention of
the attic. So, all the walls and the floor (platform for the heater) around the heater
should be insulated and sealed.
If your gas furnace is in the living area and is not surrounded by a sealed closet, you
need to build one around it like the drawing at the top of this page. YOU HAVE CARBON MONOXIDE
INSIDE YOUR HOME. This is very important. Your life depends on it.
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An attic fan grill
is a very prime target area. Does the house have a positive pressure
in it or is it a negative pressure? If you have a negative pressure
(slight vacuum) in the house, then you are infiltrating air from
outside your home. You may have leaks of air in the ducts in
the attic thus loosing air from the inside of your house as it is
exhausting into the attic and into the outside world. This will
cause a negative pressure to occur inside the home.
You must find any return air or supply air leaks and repair them.
Unwanted air in a system or good air being lost is money lost.
I suggest you look carefully at the platform, the walls, door, and
the inside 3 1/2 inches of the side walls of the furnace closet. With a
really good thermometer, measure the air entering the return air grill (living space air).
Then measure air inside the unit just before it goes into the blower.
If there is a decrease, then it has gotten some cold air from somewhere.
Have you added on another room or enclosed a garage that added to the heating load?
Has your attic insulation settled
or been squashed or moved? Do you need more insulation?
12 to 20 inches in an attic these days in common.
Have you started keeping the grand kids more often or all the time?
They will open doors a hundred times a day. If the front door and
a back door are open at the same time, you would be amazed at
the amount of conditioned air that will ZOOM out of a house,
especially if you have a gentle breeze.
If you have electric heat, make sure that no heating element is on when
it is not supposed to be. You might notice clicking sounds frequently when
the unit is off and one of the elements is still on. Have a service technician
make sure all the heating elements are working properly. Heating on just one
element when you should have three or four will cause a tremendous increase
in the bill. You would notice that the unit runs longer if that is the problem.
| During the winter I have many customers that are complaining of excessive
electrical bills that may be triple or more than the usual winter bill. Almost invariably
I will find an extremely dirty filter with electric heating. A word to the wise?
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Keeping a clean filter when you have electric heat is critical. Elements will operate too hot and
burn in two easily when you have insufficient air flow over them. At the very least, the
thermal over-heat protection will constantly turn elements on and off during poor air
movement.
If you have gas heat, have your technician check the gas pressure to the burners and clean
the burner area of rust during his next visit.
Check the "breathing" of the residence. I mean the air that infiltrates and
escapes the building with the doors and windows closed. If you were to
see a house filled with smoke and watch the hundreds of holes where
it is escaping, you would be surprised.
- Attic fans are "breather" number one. If you don't have a well insulated positive seal
as a cover for it when it is not in use, then it is leaking a lot of money in
and out of the indoor air. If you have one and don't intend to use it any
more, remove it and seal over the opening and insulate above it well.
- From your hardware store or lumber yard you can easily obtain little
sealing pads for the electrical receptacles. Remove the center screw of the
receptacle and place the pad around the opening and then reinstall the cover and
screw. Place one of the two-pronged plastic plugs (like the ones you use to prevent children
from sticking things into the holes) into all the unused receptacle
openings. Do this to all the electrical openings in your house. Don't forget the telephone
receptacles.
- Make sure your damper on the fireplace is closed when not used. The purpose of a chimney
is to form a draft for the fire. It will draft money from your house all the time if it is open
and not in use. A very good door should be installed in the opening for times the fireplace
is unused. The damper alone is seldom sufficient.
- Check your windows. Multi-layer and sealed glass is essential
for best conservation of energy. Heavy drapes are another good barrier. Close them
as often as you can.
- Check the seals on the exterior doors and repair them as needed and learn to keep
them closed as much as possible (don't stand at the entrance with the door open while talking, etc.)
- Seal cracks in walls and baseboards. Do you have any baseboards temporarily
removed. You would be surprised how much "breathing" this will add to the house.
Seal holes where nails or hooks previously were used in walls and ceilings.
- Do you have speakers in your walls or ceilings? They are a big source of air
movement.
- If possible, caulk the opens of electrical wires and plumbing as they meander through walls. This
will usually be most successful during new construction. Position the plumbing escutcheons against
the walls properly and make certain they stay there. If necessary, seal behind them. These are the
rings over pipes where they penetrate walls. They should be flush with the wall to somewhat seal
off the air movement around the pipe at the penetration. If the holes for penetration are too large, then
they must be repaired.
- The blue areas of this picture are usually areas that are well insulated. The problem is the red area.
This is the kind of situation that is all too common. Many times the red wall is not even insulated. Since it
is higher than the other walls, it becomes an "outside" wall. Remember, the attic is outside the living quarters.
The cold air of the attic can (as the arrows show) go right down in the wall the full length of the height of the wall.
This is a cold wall. Even though it has sheetrock on both sides of most of the wall it is a single wall in the attic and the area below ceiling level is the equivalent of a single wall because it is open to the outside (attic) air. Even if it has insulation in it, it can still get cold air. It is equal to a single wall and may add a lot to the heating load for the unit. Big waste of money. And I see it all the time.
Look for any exterior wall that is a "single" wall. This is a wall that will have bricks or sheet rock
on one side, but you can see studs in the open wall on its other side. It may even be filled with
insulation stapled between the studs, but that doesn't eliminate the need for a better wall. This should be corrected. You must add another layer of sheetrock or paneling to make it a "double" wall. These are especially common under the platforms of air conditioners and sometimes
these walls will "breath" right into the attic.
Other common places you will find them are
around fireplaces and in recesses in the attic for cabinets and on vertical sections of vaulted
ceilings. This will be in the attic where one ceiling height is greater than another as in the above picture.
If you look down from the attic into the cavity around the fireplace in MOST homes you will see single walls all the way from the
attic to the floor. If there is even insulation initially installed, it may be on the bottom in a heap. I see it all the time. Remember,
the attic is exterior also. Don't forget to seal around the pipe opening for the gas to the fireplace if you have this and be aware that
brick, rocks, sheetrock, and wood are extremely poor insulators.
What about the floor on your frame home? Is it insulated?
- Set the hot water heater temperature to the lowest setting you will like. 120 degrees may be quite
satisfactory once you try it. Ask your plumber to test the water heater to make sure the internal pipes
for water refills and discharge are still proper and that the build-up of deposits is satisfactory. Almost no one I know drains out these deposits as they should. They create enormous additions to the utility bills every month. If the
water heater is ten years old, replace it. You may be surprised at the difference. The cost of the new heater
is small in comparison to the continual excess in utility costs.
- Don't forget to check Bubba's room. Over the lamp and stand...pull back the drapes...behind the blinds...close his window.
And have a chat with him about conservation of utilities. And repair the sheetrock where his buddy's drum set knocked that hole in it last summer. Check for
loose exterior siding on the second floor wall and replace the bricks you removed two years ago on the back of the house when you replaced that outside faucet.
- Check all the toe boards under cabinets and vanities for proper seals. Sometimes these are open to "single"
wall construction on outside walls or to plumbing holes.
- I'm not even going to mention the heater on the pool or the green house, the workshop out back, or the flood lights.
If you have been using the cheap filters
for very long, the cooling coils will be dirty and restricting the air flow through the system. Remove the front cover
from the coil and with a mirror and light or a small amout of prying,
look at the under side of the coils to see how much dirt, etc. you can see
on the surface. If you see quite a bit on the surface, then you can
just imagine what must be trapped inside the layers of the coil.
This will add tremendously to your utility bill in both the cooling
and heating seasons.
You will not be able to clean it in place. It will have to be removed
by a technician and cleaned properly. It is worth it, though, for it will
save you a lot of utility costs in the future. Us the better filter type
and maintain it well in the future.
NOTE: To find a really good service tech, ask all the people you trust
and see who they most repeatedly recommend. I don't mean just
the company they recommend, I mean the
technician's name. If they don't know his name, he isn't really
the person you want anyway. They WILL KNOW his name if he is
dependably solving their problems and they have requested him or her
when they have called for service repairs.
Check all these things and I feel sure you will find the problem.
¹ Brand names, product names or trademarks listed belong to their respective holdings.
Click here
and send me your request by e–mail or phone.
1–866–584–0355 (toll free) or 903–759–2160 FAX 903–759–4605
If you have
comments or suggestions, please email me at James' A/C Co.
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