I'm your friendly HVAC repairman here to share my munificent expertise. I have 19 yrs experience working on mostly residential central heating and air conditioning. To avoid common complaint replies, The following caveats apply to everything written here: This post is directed at middle class homeowners with forced air split systems (inside heater and outside air conditioner). This post assumes budget is a very real concern, and will lean towards cheaper DIY points as opposed to hiring a team of mechanical engineers to optimize your comfort/efficiency ratio. This post assumes you are fairly handy. Never do any repairs without fundamentally understanding what you are working on. Being over your head while working on your system can cost you lots of $$$ in professional repair or medical/funeral costs. Yes I know "Freon" is a trademarked name for a refrigerant. Your AC worked decently last summer, and just want to do maintenance: Replace or clean your air filters. These are either in the return air grills or at the furnace.

Air flow is king for a working air conditioner. Dirty filters throw off the working pressures in the freon circuit and can cause all sorts of chaos. Loss of efficiency and capacity, uncomfortable rooms due to low air flow, and freezing up the evaporator coil (which kills ALL air flow, can make a water mess, and can damage the compressor outside $$$). The cheap fiberglass disposable filters are enough to protect the system from dirt build-up, and allow the most air flow. Clawfoot Tub New LeafHigher end pleated and electrostatic filters will improve air quality but will also get dirty faster and restrict airflow more. How Much Does It Cost To Rent A Uhaul Trailer For A WeekDepending on the house, and usage, you should change filters anywhere from monthly to seasonally. Ninja Ultimate Blender Walmart

Most should be every 1-2 months, the writing on the filter package is meaningless. Change when there is visible dirt on it. Wash your outside Air Conditioner (condenser), remove obstructions. Again, air flow is king. If your AC condenser coil is packed with grass clippings, stuck in a corner with fences, walls, dumpsters, its not going to work well. Do not put a screen around it. Do not build a shade over it. Do not put try to hide it with a lattice or any other enclosure. Your AC wants to be free with the wind blowing across its face. Use a garden hose to wash out dirt, cottonwood, dog hair, grass, etc from the coil. The best way is to disconnect the power, lift the top (try to avoid having to disconnect fan motor wires, otherwise take a pic to get them back on right) and spray with water from the inside out. Let dry before turning power back on if water got into electrical area. Your AC has done broke itself, should you repair or replace? If your system is over 5 yrs old, most of the time it is going to have the R-22 freon.

This stuff became expensive. The EPA got cranky a few years ago and accelerated the planned phase out to the newer R-410a. In everyday terms this means you will not likely replace just the outside air conditioner if it has a major problem. At minimum you will likely be replacing the evaporator coils as well. If you are replacing the AC and coil, many times you are getting close to the price of doing the complete system including furnace. This situation reduces homeowner's practical choices. Air conditioners used to be replaced all the time for <$2000 while leaving the older (generally longer life span) furnace and coil in place. Most of the time now you are looking at either patching together the AC or spending the $4000+ (sometimes very +) for a complete system. Them feds also bumped up the efficiency requirements for ACs. Its a regional phase out, but most systems installed this summer will be 14 SEER minimum. The industry has been prepared for this so the price jump isn't too bad this time.

Send me your questions. I will help you choose the correct duct tape and baling wire to hold your old air conditioner together. There are a ton of easy fixes out there that a handy homeowner can do to avoid us nasty repairmen with our exorbitant bills. Im also a high level sorcerer when it comes to geothermals, tankless water heaters, and lots of other arcane house needs. I do not believe boilers, chillers, and fuel oil furnaces exist. If you insist you have one of those mythical things in your house, please respect my beliefs by not asking about them. I live in an area of the US where we dont truck with them goofy things. basically I'm saying I have zero experience with them and would be blowing smoke if I gave advice I will respond to questions not completely answered by others in this thread, you may just have to be a touch patient with me For Household Electrically Enhanced Wet Scrubber A household air purification unit for kitchens, labs, & smokers used to scrub fine particulates and VOC's out of the air.

This is my invention of an electrostaticly augmented cyclonic wet scrubber. It is a device that purifies the air by using water and electricity, without the use of a fabric filter. My vision is to leverage this technology to solve a variety of common household air quality problems. It would be awesome to use this technology to build centralized air cleaning units in homes, or stand alone air purifiers, or counter top kitchen range hoods, or laboratory recirculating fume hoods/extractors, or appliances that allow people to smoke indoors comfortably. Perhaps even a generic air-cleaning unit with multiple attachments that can do it all! This invention is of vital importance to households as the air quality in households are not regulated by the EPA. More often than not, air quality inside a home is much worse than outside air due to trapped dust and allergens, smoke from cooking, chemicals from cleaning, and volatile organic compounds (VOC's) that leach from common building materials like carpet and paint.

Serious chronic health conditions, ranging from asthma and bronchitis to lung cancer, can arise because of poor indoor air quality. Children and the elderly are most susceptible to developing these respiratory problems because of the amount of time they spend indoors. My invention would be very valuable in the average household during the winter, when there is very little natural ventilation in the home to flush out indoor pollutants. It is also especially useful in areas like Beijing, where smog and PM2.5 air particles are constantly at high levels. Being an asthmatic myself and having a non-smoker friend recently being diagnosed with lung cancer, this invention is quite personal to me and I find indoor air quality a very pressing issue to address. Current wet scrubber technology is generally used in industrial settings to clean heavily polluted air, such as the exhaust of coal fired power plants and garbage incinerators. However, I strongly believe they need to be implemented into homes in one or more ways.

My invention improves upon current wet scrubbing technology and makes it more accessible to the average household in both size and cost. For the DIY enthusiast, my invention would be particularly useful in the workshop. Many DIY workshops produce dust, smoke, and harmful VOC's from activities ranging from soldering, welding, grinding, painting, cutting and staining wood, laser cutting, 3d printing, to chemistry experiments. The equipment required to clean such pollutants can get very pricey very fast. One of my goals is to make everything about my invention DIY, cheap, and yet have excellent results so the DIY enthusiast can make their own air cleaning device on a low budget. I built all of my prototypes as cheaply as possible and used second hand goods from Good Will and salvaged parts from electronic waste. Anyone on a tight budget can build one of these with parts sourced from a second hand store or a local hardware store. Why Not Use A HEPA? I chose wet scrubber technology over typical HEPA fabric filters for three reasons.

One, because you can theoretically get the same results as a HEPA but don’t have to keep buying expensive filters - all you need is water and electricity. Second, wet scrubber technology can be used for applications where humid or oily particulates need to be removed, such as from cooking exhaust in the kitchen. HEPA fabric filters cannot handle humid or oil-laden air as it will get clogged and deteriorate. And third, wet scrubbers can absorb volatile organic compounds or gases that are soluble in water. How Does It Work? The key to my invention lies in the geometry of the wet scrubber and the use of electricity to boost its scrubbing power. My design is very scalable and can be implemented in a small form factor, providing good performance from a device the size of a counter top appliance. It first ionizes the incoming particulate laden air via a high voltage pre-charger. This pre-charger can either be a pool of high voltage conductive liquid manipulated to form an electrospray, or simply a metal charge grid that emits a corona discharge.

The charged particulate laden air is then directed into a highly turbulent spiral path, impacting a scrubbing liquid that is either held to ground potential or charged to the opposite polarity. The large particulates will separate from the air as it impacts the scrubbing liquid. Fine particles are attached to the scrubbing liquid through means of electrostatic attraction. Some VOC’s will dissolve into the scrubbing liquid. The rest of the VOC’s are scrubbed in the next stage, where the air is passed through an adsorbent bed of activated carbon. How Does It Perform?The wet scrubber alone can filter out particles above 2um at nearly 100%. Below that threshold, the wet scrubber's filtering ability drops and relies on the electrostatic stage to capture the finest particles. The electrostatic section alone can filter the smaller particulates below 2um down to sub-micron ranges. I'm seeing a bit of penetration for the smallest sub-micron particles for a dense smoke source at about 100cfm air flow.