Heating And Air Conditioning

If Your Air Conditioning Is Not Working…

 Ensure the unit is powered on
 Check for dirty filters
 Check your thermostat for proper settings
Check for blown fuses or tripped circuit breaker

If none of these work – call us! We offer 24-hour emergency service as well! Do not attempt to fix it yourself, as this could void your warranty!

How Does A Gas Furnace Work?

To understand how a gas furnace works, one needs to know the parts of a gas furnace. A furnace is principally divided into three sections. The first section is the made up of the burners, heat exchangers, draft inducers and venting. The second section is made up of controls and safety devices and the third section is made up of the blower and air movement. All the gas furnace parts work together to make the gas furnace work.

Your furnace combines air and fuel (in this case gas) and the mixture is ignited. The resultant flame is then used to heat the air. This air is then circulated throughout the house. The heating process starts in the burner of the furnace, which is controlled by a thermostat. When the temperature of the house drops down, the thermostat alerts the furnace. The mixture of gas and air slowly starts entering the burner of the furnace and is ignited as a result of an electronic igniter. The air in the burner thus gets drastically heated and starts rising through the heat exchanger which is situated above the burner. It then spreads inside the house warming it up, while the exhaust exits the furnace from a vent and is let outside the house.

In the meantime, fresh air is pulled into the furnace with the help of an electric fan. The air comes in through a large flat grill in your home and passes into an enclosure known as the return air duct. The return air duct passes the air through a protective filter and into the bottom of the furnace. Here the air is pressurized by the fan and forced through the heat exchanger and into the plenum to be delivered to the various rooms in your home. This process is repeated till the temperature of the house reaches a specific level after which the thermostat stops the heating process.

Heat transfer and air-source heat pumps

There are many different kinds of heat pumps, but they all operate on the same basic principle of heat transfer.

Heat transfer means that rather than burning fuel to create heat, a device moves heat from one place to another. Heat naturally flows downhill, which means that it tends to move from a location with a high temperature to a location with a lower temperature.

A heat pump uses a small amount of energy to switch that process into reverse, this pulls heat out of a low-temperature area, and pumps it into a higher temperature area.

One of the most common types of heat pumps is the air-source heat pump, which takes heat from the air outside your home and pumps it inside through refrigerant-filled coils. Inside this basic heat pump, you’ll find two fans, coils, a reversing valve and a compressor.

The reversing valve is a very versatile part of a heat pump. It reverses the flow of the refrigerant, so that the system begins to operate in the opposite direction. Instead of pumping heat inside your home, the heat pump releases it, just like an air conditioner. The refrigerant now absorbs heat on the indoor side of the unit and flows to the outside, where the heat is released and the refrigerant cools and flows back indoors to pick up more heat.

Home heat pumps are usually “split” systems with an outdoor and indoor component installed through the wall. The indoor coil is usually mounted above a furnace or air handler system.

With proper design, air-source systems work well with other types of indoor heating systems to offer a carbon free heating option during our local temperate seasons – more of the season is covered if you choose a low temperature (hyper-heat) system.

Condensing boilers are becoming the standard today over the conventional ones because of their larger and more efficient heat exchangers.

A condensing boiler’s goal is to recover as much waste heat as possible. Highly efficient condensing boilers can convert up to 98 percent of their fuel into heat compared to only 78 percent for the conventional ones.