Keeping your home comfortable in the fall

Now that the weather is starting to cool, the Tampa Tribune has published some tips on keeping your home comfortable when you are staring to open windows and let air in.

You can read the entire article here, but here are some highlights:

The article says not only to open windows but to use fans for comfort. Jay Hoover, president of Integrity Air, recommends that you be sure to turn off fans when you leave the room to save energy.

The article says that doing laundry at night when it is cooler helps as well as replacing standard incandescent lightbulbs with the new compact flourescent bulbs, which give off much less heat. Compact flourescent bulbs are more energy efficient, give off less hest and last longer. However, they contain mercury, and must be disposed of with care and time of replacement.

Also running the bathroom exhaust fan for 10-20 minutes after a shower will help lower indoor humidity.

The Benefits of Routine Maintenance

I received a phone call from a customer who wanted to know the age of the central air system we in installed in her home.

"This will be easy", I thought. "I'll just pull the invoice from our file."

The invoice wasn't there. Our current customer files only go back to 2000, and it seemed that our customer's system was older than that. So I climbed up into our attic and found the pre-2000 invoices in a box.

Our customer's system was installed in December 1998. The average life expectancy of a central air system is 12-15 years, and this one was nearly 10 years old and remarkably, had never broken down and shows no sign of doing so. I can look at two reasons for this fortune:

1) The customer invested in quality filters and changed them regularly. This is the air conditioning equivalent of brushing and flossing each day. Good filters will help keep your indoor coil clean which helps with indoor air quality and efficiency.

2) This system had regular tune-ups and inspections under our Top Performance Program. We see this system twice a year, so any minor issues get resolved before they become major ones.

Doing this may not guaranty a long life for your system, but the money invested in a regular maintenance program will help your air conditioner run at Top Performance for a long time.

Beware of AC Copper Thieves

You’ve probable read or heard on local news that, with the rising price of copper, there is an increase in the theft of central air outdoor units in the Tampa Bay airwaves.

Copper everywhere is at risk of being stolen. Thousands of dollars of damage are done to half-built houses when thieves rip out the walls for a few hundred dollars worth of copper wire.

In the case of central air outdoor units, the places most at risk are abandoned houses and businesses. For example, bars and nightclubs would get hit in the morning or churches would become victimized on weekdays when no one is there.

Many churches have put chain link fences around their outdoor units. Also available are various kinds of alarms (much like home security systems) to notify you when someone is tampering with your outdoor unit.

The sad thing is that many central air contractors acquire scrap copper from old units they have replaced. Some contractors would be happy to freely give these old units to someone who would take them away. Instead, criminals would rather cost a church or business thousands of dollars in damages to steal under $100 worth of copper.

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