What You Can Do if Your Air Conditioner Struggles to Keep Up During a Summer Heat Wave
When a summer heat wave hits, your air conditioner may struggle to keep your home cool no matter how low you set the thermostat. During these times, your air conditioner is working as hard as it possibly can in order to reduce indoor temperatures. You can help your air conditioner keep your home cool by improving its ability to circulate air and making sure that it's working properly. When outside temperatures are soaring and your air conditioner isn't keeping your home comfortably cool, here's what you can do.
1. Replace Your Air Filter
Over time, the filter in your air conditioner collects large amounts of dust from the air and becomes clogged. In order to keep your air conditioner running well, you'll need to replace your air filter periodically—check on it every month to make sure it hasn't become clogged with dust. Unfortunately, many homeowners neglect this task and suffer from poor air conditioning performance as a result. Replacing your air conditioner's filter with a clean one will reduce air resistance and significantly increase your air conditioner's ability to circulate cool air throughout your home.
2. Keep Your Registers and Doors Open
You may experience poor cooling performance from your air conditioner simply because it has difficulty blowing cool air throughout your home. In order to increase airflow, make sure all of the air conditioning registers in your home are opened. Closing registers increases the pressure in your air ducts, which increases air resistance and makes it more difficult for your air conditioner to circulate air around your home. You'll also need to make sure that the doors in your home are kept open as much as possible in order to improve air circulation—a door that's left closed in a room with an output register can cause the same problem as keeping the register closed.
3. Purchase Standing Fans to Circulate Air
One of the best ways to inexpensively keep yourself cool during a heat wave is to buy fans. Fans quickly circulate air around the room, and that increased air circulation constantly forces cool air onto your skin. You'll feel much cooler even if the room's true temperature is still high.
Note that fans don't actually cool down a room—they only make people inside the room feel cooler. This means that you shouldn't run fans inside a room when nobody's inside—this applies to both standing fans and ceiling fans. Fans generate a small amount of heat while they're running, which means they contribute to the overall heat gain inside your house. If someone is in the room, however, then the cooling effect of the circulating air outweighs the small amount of heat generated by the fan. When nobody's using the fan, all it's doing is wasting electricity and making your home's temperature slightly higher.
4. Install a Window Air Conditioner or Portable Air Conditioner
When the heat is entirely unbearable for you, purchase a window air conditioner or a portable air conditioner. Window air conditioners are more efficient, but they're limited in where you can place them—you're limited to rooms with easily-accessible windows. The extra cooling power of a portable air conditioner or a window air conditioner can help you make it through the heat wave.
If nothing helps or if you think that you have problems with your air conditioning unit, call professional air conditioning services for inspection. Sometimes the problem lies within the condenser coils or the evaporator coils within the air conditioning system—if either of these coils become dirty, it can significantly reduce your air conditioner's ability to cool your home.
Air conditioning services can clean these coils for you. You shouldn't attempt to clean them on your own since the coils are very thin and easily broken. A professional air conditioning technician can improve the performance of your air conditioner and help you stay cool during a summer heat wave—they can also tell you if your air conditioner is properly sized for your home. In some cases, you may need to upgrade your air conditioner to a larger one in order to keep your home cool during uncommonly high temperatures.
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