Adding Central Air Conditioning to Your Home

In many parts of the country, air conditioning is an absolute must-have item. Not only does it create a comfortable oasis from frequent summer heat waves, but lacking any form of AC can also severely damage the resale value of your home. Considered only a few decades ago to be a luxury item reserved for high end homes, air conditioning is now almost universally seen as a basic appliance, as common and expected as central heating in even the most modest households.

Advantages of Central Air

While many homes still make do with window air conditioners, central air has many advantages. Most importantly, a window unit can usually only cool a single room at a time. In a pinch, several small rooms can be marginally cooled together, although this is extremely inefficient and requires the use of additional fans to blow cool air from one room into the other. A central air conditioner will cool every room in the house and provide a comfortable, uniform temperature throughout. Also, a whole house air conditioning system uses only one compressor motor and one circulating fan, which provides a huge energy savings over several individual window air conditioners running simultaneously. Although the motor on a central air unit is much larger than a window air conditioner, it operates on 220 volts, which uses less current to produce the same amount of cooling as its window counterpart.

Additionally, a central air conditioner provides quiet cooling to the entire house. The compressor is placed outside the home, usually in an unused corner of the yard, allowing it to hum away all day unnoticed by the occupants indoors. This creates a much more comfortable indoor environment when compared to the loud din created by window units, even when the compressor itself is cycled off. Finally, the power drain created by several window air conditioners running simultaneously can overtax the electrical systems of older homes. Any given electrical circuit can only accommodate a single air conditioner before blowing a fuse or tripping a breaker, and many older homes were built with only two or three circuits to power the entire house. Modern construction codes now require a separate circuit for every five or six wall outlets, but even then, the simple act of running a sweeper while your window AC is running can send you to the basement to reset a tripped breaker.

Disadvantages of Central Air

Aside from the initial cost, there are no disadvantages to installing central air in your home, but there are a few conditions in which central air will be more problematic. Houses with boiler heat do not have the necessary duct work to run central air. Likewise, homes with electric baseboard heating will also require extensive modification in order to enjoy the quiet comfort of a whole house air conditioner. While it is possible to run relatively thin pipes throughout the building to deliver the cold air, it is a significant additional investment. If your house is not suitable to affordably add central air, there are several multi-room outdoor air conditioning units on the market that run delivery tubes outside the home and can deliver cold air to up to three rooms per unit.

Whichever path you choose, the addition of central air conditioning will add greatly to your summertime comfort level and increase the value of your home.