Air Conditioning

I learned a great lesson today from Marcus, the service tech at Mountain Aire in Yreka. We had replaced the compressor and fan motor on a client's air conditioner here but the tenant called yet again to report no cold air was flowing.

Well, the first lesson was that ants are attracted to the electrical contacts in the A / C's panel. He had found them at this location on one of his earlier visits. So if you have ants (who in Lake Shastina doesn't?) be sure to spray or put out poison bait, especially near the air conditioner panel.

The other point he made is that most residential air conditioning units are sized to keep the temperature no higher than 70 or 72 degrees in a typical home. To get down into the 60's one would be over-working the compressor which can ice up as it did in the instance we inspected last night.

We also checked the filter in the furnace return vent. If a filter is plugged up the air conditioner will struggle against itself trying to pull air in to cool it. In this case the filter was clear but since many of us run the furnace fan all day and night when it's hot outside they plug up sooner than usual so don't wait the normal 3 months or whatever. It's cheap insurance. By the way, furnace return vents are larger than output vents (registers) and usually located high on the wall or ceiling where the warm air collects to make for more efficient heating in winter.

So three simple preventative things we can all do to avoid service calls: keep the ants away from the A / C panel, use the manufacturer's suggested settings of 72* in the daytime and 78* at night. Or higher, according to your comfort level. And check the air filters in the furnace return vent.