You’ve been a slave to the seasons for far too long, with their unpredictable bouts of extreme weather. You’re ready to do something drastic to make sure you can enjoy a reasonable temperature all year round. That’s right, you’re about to take the plunge and purchase a central air conditioning system for your home or commercial building. However, a few small reservations are still preventing you from making the call. Does central air conditioning really offer that many advantages? Furthermore, will the advantages of an air conditioning system outweigh the costs of maintaining, servicing, and repairing one?
Nobody can tell you whether a central air conditioner will be the right investment. However, it can be beneficial to examine the benefits that central air conditioning can provide so that you can make an informed choice about the cooling systems you use in your home. Let’s take a detailed look at some of the ways that central air conditioning can change the climate in your home, and address some of the concerns that people have when they are deciding whether to install an HVAC.
The Main Advantages of an Air Conditioning System
Of course, a central air conditioning system can make you more comfortable, but is it the only way? Of course not. Nobody has ever claimed that central air conditioning is the only way to stay cool when the weather fails to do so, but there are those who would argue that central air conditioning is the best way to beat the heat. To find out, it’s worth asking whether there are any exclusive benefits to using an air conditioning system.
The main advantage of using a central air conditioner over other methods is that central AC can cool your entire home simultaneously. Room air conditioners will certainly change the air temperature, but they will only do so within a limited radius. Since you can’t take them with you from room to room and you probably don’t want to spend all your time camped out in front of the indoor unit, this presents a problem with which central AC owners need not concern themselves.
Of course, you might have other devices like fans elsewhere in your building. However, fans do not improve air quality the way an air conditioning system does. Fans also make a lot of noise and can blow things all over the place, like important papers or the hairstyle you worked on for hours.
A quality central air conditioning system will almost certainly be quieter than a fan, and will do much less to disturb the air. Furthermore, air conditioners have a noticeably positive impact on air quality in the buildings where they are installed. Here’s some even better news: the improvements that air conditioners make in air quality have been linked to better cardiovascular health in residents. That’s right—air conditioning may help improve your heart health.
Addressing the Challenges of an Air Conditioning System
So, to recap: central air conditioners provide health benefits by improving air quality, make less noise than fans, and effectively cool every part of your home at once. They represent an easy-to-operate solution for dramatically increasing your health and wellbeing when indoors during hot periods. However, many people are still afraid to use central air conditioners because they fear potential long-term expenses. Is there any truth to these concerns?
It’s true that a central air conditioner has the potential to be expensive. You may already be familiar with that oft-quoted statistic about 48% of a home’s energy bill being accounted for by heating and cooling. However, it’s a mistake to attribute that entire figure to the energy used by a central air conditioner in good condition. Many factors make up that 48%, including the use of your furnace in the winter, the power it takes to run your refrigerator, and the heat you use to raise your water temperature for bathing, washing clothes, or doing the dishes.
Furthermore, it’s easy to keep your air conditioner costs affordable when you perform regular preventative maintenance on your system and have it serviced by professionals once or twice each year. This kind of preemptive work can prevent the kinds of malfunctions that cause efficiency problems and eventually lead to the need for expensive repairs. When you take care of your air conditioner and arrange for a technician to check your unit occasionally, you’ll be able to keep your unit running efficiently for no more than a couple hundred dollars each year. This breaks down to a small amount each month to keep your home cool—probably much less than your phone or internet bills.
The advantages of owning an air conditioning system are numerous, and they can make your life significantly easier. If you plan carefully and take care of your system, you should find it easy to offset long-term expenses and acquire an air conditioner you’ll be able to trust whenever things in your local area heat up.