Mike Cappuccio from N.E.T.R. Inc. discusses how to size an air conditioning system, and the effect of having too large of an air conditioning system for your size home. Mike also explains other factors that go into determining the air conditioning needs of your home, including insulation, new windows, and more.
Hi, my name is Mike Cappuccio, I’m with N.E.T.R. Inc. in North Andover, Massachusetts, and I’m here today to talk to you about sizing an air conditioning system for your home. One of the most common problems we see in the industry is that people buy too big of an air conditioning system for their home and a lot of people think, “Hey, bigger is better, if I put in a bigger air conditioning system in my house it’ll be colder than my neighbor’s house and I’m going to have the biggest, best air conditioning system.” Well, not always that happens.
Let me tell you some of the things that can happen when you purchase too big of a system. When you purchase too big of an air conditioning system, what it tends to do, it’ll cool the house but what it does is it brings the house right down to temperature real quick, and it doesn’t allow the air conditioner to run at all. It gets it cold, but it doesn’t remove any of the latent heat, it doesn’t remove any of the moisture from the home. What you end up with is a cold, clammy room.
Example, you can have a 70 degree room with 78% relative humidity on a 90% relative humidity day. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in a cold, rainy environment, but that’s what your home will feel like. Now, doesn’t sound that bad, it’s cold but here’s what can happen. Cold clammy damp rooms cause mold. We don’t want that to happen in your home. When you look at sizing an air conditioning system you size it to the right load of the home.
What we do is we come up, we perform a manual J-load calculation on the home, see what size air conditioning system the home is going to need, determine what improvements have you made to your home, any insulation, windows, things like that, because that’s all going to come into play with the size of your air conditioning system. I go out, I look at a lot of homes, I see a lot of things, and most of the time I come back and I plug it into a computer and half the time it doesn’t need the amount of air conditioning that I think it needs because of the improvements they’ve done to their home.
When you look at sizing an air conditioning system, know how you use your home, know what improvements you’ve made to your home. Hire a professional to come out and look at the home and do a manual J-load calculation on the home, determine what it needs, because you don’t want to run into these problems of having mold in your home and cold, clammy rooms and things like that, because you’ve over-sized your air conditioning system. You need to size the air conditioning system so it runs 70% to 80% of the time to remove the moisture from the home.
