If your electric bill is sky-high, and it has you tearing your hair out, you may think that your air conditioner is broken. But it might not be. Not necessarily.
In fact, there are often multiple factors in why an air conditioner isn’t working efficiently, or why it may be racking up a lot of kilowatt hours during a hot month. Here are some of them.
Higher Electricity Rates
This is always something to factor into your bill. But it’s especially important right now, because electricity rates are jumping. Some utility providers have raised rates more than 20% or 25% over the last year, and that’s showing on people’s bills!
So before you jump to conclusions when opening an envelope and receiving a higher than usual energy bill, you may not actually be dealing with inefficiency at all, but rather, with changes in the utility industry.
People also don’t know that they can shop around for rates for electrical providers in many states and communities.
Inadequate Zoning
Another reason that the air conditioning system may not be working well has to do with how it was set up in the first place.
New homeowners may be purchasing a home with a central air conditioning system that has been in place for a while. But unless they ask the previous owner at settlement, they don’t know if that air conditioning unit was meant for a particular area of the property, and whether the previous owner supplemented that system with window units or anything else.
So if you have a building with central air – your central air is only as good as its layout. A good many central air systems were not made to heat all floors of the building, and using them that way can be tremendously inefficient.
Also, sometimes people change the energy footprint with the way that they use a building. You may be spending more time in a room or space than previous owners did.
All of that can contribute to the problem as well.
Old Systems
It does also happen, though, that systems get less efficient as they age.
In fact, it’s amazing how often we come out to a property and look at a system that’s really past its natural lifetime.
Industry professionals use a 30-year mark as the length of time that a system should be able to deliver efficient cooling. But people are using systems 35, 40 and 45 years old!
Those are some components of what you might be facing if you’re dealing with high energy bills during the summer.
Sometimes there is something wrong with your unit. Sometimes you need a recharge, or the compressor isn’t working properly, or the system is just plain worn out.
But in order to really get to your solution, you need to do the homework to figure out what’s actually going on in terms of the bills that you’re generating and the kilowatt hours that you use. There may be some math involved…
If you hate this kind of thing, don’t despair – just call Honest HVAC: in the Fairfax area, we make it our business to help property owners to set up actionable plans for home heating and cooling.