Mobile homes and regular housing differ in some important ways, and these differences impact the HVAC solutions that each type of housing can hold.
HVAC is short for heating, ventilation and air conditioning. When you consider that a mobile home is often a fraction of the size of a regular home, you’ll start to understand the rationale behind some of the differences in heating and cooling.
Differences Between the Two HVAC Units
As you can imagine, mobile homes lack central air conditioning, central heating or a comprehensive HVAC unit that might be installed on a commercial property’s rooftop. Practical limitations make these difficult or impossible to install on a mobile home.
Forced Air Unit
So, what exactly do mobile homes do for heat in the winter? Many mobile homes use a forced air unit to combat the cold.
Since there’s little room for a large furnace or central heating unit, most mobile homes come with a furnace cabinet to accommodate a forced air unit and keep the entire mobile home comfortable year-round.
The furnace cabinet on a mobile home has a vented door, which emulates the exhaust vent you would find near your home’s furnace. It’s still critical for mobile home owners to ensure that nothing obstructs the vent from doing its job. A blockage will cause the internal parts of the mobile home’s forced air unit to overheat and possibly malfunction.
In contrast to a central heating unit found in many homes, or rooftop HVAC at commercial properties, the forced air unit affixed to a mobile home usually has to be disassembled to get to the unit’s ignition.
Central Air Vs. Window Unit
Regular homes can usually accommodate central air conditioning with its network of vents, ducts and thermostats.
The same is not true for most mobile homes. Mobile homes usually get cooled off with the help of a window air conditioning unit. There are a few mobile homes that have ducts connected to the furnace as well as cooling coils within the mobile home’s furnace cabinet itself, but this kind of setup is rare.
Other mobile homes have an ingenious network of crossover ducts under the edifice itself. These crossover ducts, as the name implies, transfer hot and cold air from one end of the mobile home to the other. A crossover duct network is normally well-insulated and can substantially reduce the utility bills of mobile home owners.
Heating and Cooling Differences
The differences listed above between a mobile home’s heating and cooling solutions and a regular home’s HVAC largely comes down to a mobile home’s smaller size and other practical limitations of life on the road. If you need more help discovering the right HVAC solution for your home, contact Valley Comfort Heating and Air today.