5 Ways Insulation Impacts Your AC System in Boerne, TX
The insulation in your home in Boerne, TX, can have a major impact on nearly every important aspect of what your air conditioner does and how it functions. To stay cool and comfortable without breaking the bank, you must understand the relationship between these two things. Here’s how insulation can affect your AC system:
Cooling Performance
Insulation should create a barrier between the air inside your home and outside it. If your insulation is adequate, almost no air should cross that barrier. That will have a direct effect on how well your AC system can keep you cool.
To see insulation’s effect on your air conditioner’s performance, simply imagine what would happen if your AC system started working while you happened to have poor insulation. At least some warm air from outdoors would seep into your home, and at least some of the cool air that your AC system produces would escape outside. So, your air conditioner’s ability to keep your home cool, even if nothing happened to be wrong with the system itself, would probably be unsatisfactory.
Energy Efficiency
Weak insulation can have additional ripple effects that go beyond merely making your AC system’s cooling abilities appear lackluster. After dropping your AC system’s performance, thin insulation will also begin cutting into its energy efficiency.
Once your air conditioner is no longer able to cool your home as well as before, your thermostat will take notice of the fact that indoor temperatures aren’t dropping to the appropriate level. Consequently, it’ll force your AC system to work harder and consume more energy.
However, if cool air keeps escaping through gaps in your insulation, the greater energy expenditure won’t bring about the desired effect. Hence, your AC system’s efficiency will decline.
Need for AC Repairs
With your AC system now working at a higher pace, the strain on its parts will ratchet up, and this can take quite a toll. If you don’t address your insulation issues, your air conditioner may end up continuously overworking itself. In dire cases, it may end up operating constantly, never passing through a normal cooling cycle.
Therefore, your AC system’s parts will be more likely to malfunction. As you pay more money for more frequent repairs, the situation will enter a negative feedback loop, and your AC system’s performance and efficiency will diminish even further.
Lifespan of the Air Conditioner
The ultimate result of all of this cumulative stress will be to cut short your AC system’s useful life. If all goes well, you can expect a central air conditioner to function reliably for about 15 years. While annual maintenance can do a great deal to maximize your system’s lifespan, failure to address the underlying cause of all the trouble — your subpar insulation — will mean that not even the best tuneups will do much to keep it from failing.
Indoor Air Quality (IAQ)
We’ve spent most of our time discussing insulation’s ability to keep out unwanted heat from the outdoors, but it also has the power to greatly hinder the entry of airborne pollutants into your home. Insulation maintains your IAQ both by keeping things like dirt and pollen from flowing into your home and by denying them reentry after your ventilation system has removed them.
Your AC system’s air filters are its most obvious IAQ-related tools, but good insulation can augment their work and relieve some of the pressure that’s on them. This, in turn, will mean that your HVAC system’s interior will be cleaner than it otherwise would be, and its performance will therefore be correspondingly better. Nevertheless, you still need to change or clean your AC system’s filters at least once every three months and to provide the whole system with annual maintenance.
Your air conditioner is an integrated system. Each part of which plays an important role in keeping your home in Boerne, TX, cool and comfortable. Insulation is no less crucial an aspect of this system than any of the others. For help bringing your AC system to peak performance this summer, call Climate Control Heating & Air to request our air conditioning services.
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