If you live in an all-electric home, there are several choices available to you when it comes to heating during the winter. The two main ones are the electric furnace and the heat pump. Because we don’t experience fierce winters here in Katy, your heating system will run for only a short season—but that doesn’t mean that just any heater will do.
In fact, choosing between a heat pump and an electric furnace is a big decision, because it will also affect how you cool the house. A heat pump is a two-in-one system that works as both an air conditioner and a heater, so if you choose a heat pump installation, you’re also making the decision on how you’re cooling the house. If you choose an electric furnace, you’re also deciding to either keep your current AC or install a separate AC unit.
It’s the end of the year, and we’re experiencing bone-chilling temperatures here of around … let’s see … 67°F during the day. Yes, not exactly the Blizzard of 1888 (
Last year we wrote a post about what to do about your air conditioning system 
A common and major repair problem air conditioning systems run into is leaking refrigerant. Tiny holes along the copper refrigerant lines allow the refrigerant level in the system to drop, and that puts the entire air conditioner in jeopardy. Air conditioning systems are manufactured to run a specific charge (amount) of refrigerant. If that drops, it will not only lower cooling capacity, it will eventually inflict irreparable damage to the components, concluding with a burnt-out compressor.
In the world of air conditioners, SEER ratings are just about everything. We’re sure that when you started looking into an air conditioner, you did a little research and quickly stumbled upon SEER ratings. SEER stands for Season Energy Efficiency Ratio. It’s what you use to measure how efficient an air conditioner is. Most of the time, you’d think that the higher the SEER rating the better, right? But what if this isn’t always true?
Nobody likes it when the humidity rises on a hot summer day, because we know what that feels like—a much hotter day. The truth is that high humidity doesn’t raise the temperature of the air. What it does is make it harder for our bodies to release heat through our skin. More heat is trapped in our bodies, and so we feel even hotter. Think of humidity as like throwing a blanket around your body on a hot day. Not something you would want to do.
Air conditioners are complex pieces of machinery, so when anything in them breaks, it requires detective work to locate the cause. This is one of the reasons we recommend you turn to professionals only when you have an air conditioning system that isn’t working. Unless the problem is basic–like a tripped circuit breaker–it takes skilled technicians to find out what the specific malfunction is so it can be fixed.
You don’t want anything in your house to leak, especially not parts of the plumbing or the water heater. But have you thought about the air conditioning system leaking? It may not have crossed your mind it could happen, until you see evidence that it’s happening: water dripping out of the HVAC cabinet and starting to puddle on the floor.
This may be the spring when you choose to get a new