Month: August 2022

Indoor humidity is a drag. It makes relaxing extremely difficult—after all, you are sweating inside your home! It can affect your health, triggering asthma attacks and flaring allergies. It tends to put everyone in a sluggish mood—even the goldfish. Let’s zap that excess moisture right out of the room, and look at ways to manage your Arizona home’s relative indoor humidity.

At ACS Air Conditioning Services, we always strive to find ways to improve your comfort and energy savings. We believe you should control your comfort, and it starts with your indoor air quality (IAQ) and relative indoor humidity.

How to Manage Your Home’s Humidity

First of all let us answer the main question: what humidity level do I want in my Tuscon home?

The answer is going to be different for every person! It’s like the temperature—some like it hot and others like it cold. Typically, you want your humidity between 30 and 50 percent for ideal comfort levels.

According to the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), reducing indoor humidity levels to below 60 percent helps control the growth of mold and reduces potential heath problems associated with mold exposures such as allergic reactions, asthma and other respiratory issues. A relatively inexpensive instrument called a hygrometer can measure the indoor relative humidity at your home or business.

Dehumidification

Your air conditioner (AC) removes humidity from the air, but this is not always sufficient to maintain ideal humidity levels in the home. The best recommendation for managing the excessive humidity levels in your home is to install a whole-house dehumidifier. This device works with your heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment to remove moisture from the air before it circulates through your Tuscon home.

A dehumidifier helps to keep your home comfortable all summer long. It operates similarly to your AC unit in that moisture is collected by a refrigeration coil within the device. This excessive moisture is then drained and the conditioned air is distributed throughout the home.

Signs that you have too much humidity at home:

• Moist or sticky air
• Damp or musty smell
• Condensation on your windows
• Wet walls
• Bacterial growth (in either the home, attic, or crawlspace)

Too much humidity in the air can cause:

• Poor indoor air quality that could lead to illness
• Mold, mildew, and bacteria growth
• Worse or more frequent symptoms for asthma or allergy sufferers
• Damage to your home from extensive exposure to moisture

Humidification 

There are a few different options for whole-house humidifier systems, but they all essentially add moisture to the air in your central heating system to increase humidity levels to the desired range.

A properly designed and installed humidification system can make a significant difference in a home, but only if designed and installed properly. A poorly installed system can cause a world of headaches for the unsuspecting homeowner. Improper humidification and design can lead to mold or bacterial growth throughout the home or attic. Equipment failure due to poor installation can lead to leaks and damage ceilings, wall, insulation, framing, or even roofing.

Signs that you do not have enough humidity at home:

• Asthma and allergy symptoms worsen
• Dry skin and chapped lips
• Wooden floors or furniture which dries out and cracks
• Your home never feels as warm as the thermostat indicates

A lack of humidity can cause:

• Sickness to spread more easily
• Home damage from dry/cracked wood
• Increase in utility bills

Fix Your Ducts!

Before considering a whole-house system to add or remove humidity from your home, first ensure your home and ductwork is properly sealed and insulated. No system can keep a home comfortable if these things are not up to standard. Schedule an appointment with ACS Air Conditioning Services to have one of our professionals inspect and seal your ductwork so we can determine the next step to maintaining ideal humidity levels in your home.

Call Your Air Quality Experts Today!

In both humidification and dehumidification, there are a wide range of products and price points to consider. At ACS Air Conditioning Services, our professionals will walk you through the selection and design process. We take into account the many variables involved in creating the perfect system so you are comfortable through all of the seasons in your Tuscon, AZ, home. Call 520-230-5668 or request service online today to learn more about tackling humidity.

Heating and cooling a commercial building in Marana presents different challenges and needs than heating and cooling a Marana home. This is primarily due to the size of the building and how many people it needs to accommodate at one time. There might be many offices in various parts of the building, along with the possibility of a number of floors, and each may require a different temperature simultaneously.

Despite these differences, commercial buildings have some of the same issues to face as an Arizona home––inefficiency in heating and cooling resulting in unnecessarily high utility bills and inconsistent comfort levels. To address these, the most efficient thing to do is install a zone control system. Call one of our professionals at ACS Air Conditioning Services, and we will be happy to discuss your specifics with you.

What Is a Zone Control System?

A zone control system allows one heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system to be utilized efficiently by many users simultaneously in different areas, or zones, of one building. Each zone is operated independently of the others without the temperature choices of one zone significantly impeding or affecting the others.

Zones can be designed to be as small as one office or as large as an entire floor. The zoned system uses thermostats, a control panel, and zone dampers in the ducts, working in tandem with the HVAC system to meet the needs of the users.

Fact is, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) states HVAC systems account for 40 percent of electricity usage when it comes to commercial buildings.

How Does an HVAC Zone Control System Work?

In an Arizona commercial building, the zone control system provides precise control over the temperature in each designated area or office space using only single-zone unitary HVAC equipment. Thermostats connect to a central control panel to open and shut dampers distributed throughout the building’s ductwork, thus blocking or releasing hot or cold air.

Each area’s temperature is set, and the zone control system does the rest of the work. The system warms or cools the spaces used the most at the time they’re needed. Every zone has its own thermostat and damper system controlling the heating and cooling provided to that space.

It’s an efficient system, for example, for buildings that may have office space using a lot of technology. An area with many computers may need to be cooled more to offset the equipment’s heat, but the cooler temperatures won’t affect the adjacent offices or areas in separate zones.

What Are the Benefits of a Zone Control System?

A zoned HVAC system has several benefits for commercial buildings:

• Consistent heating and cooling. It’s all about temperature control. If a space, or zone, requires more heating or cooling, simply adjusting the thermostat will meet that need. Even in areas of a building that may traditionally be harder to heat or cool, this precise temperature control compensates for the inconsistency. Measures can be even more efficient with programmable thermostats.

• Less energy use. Since unused areas are now zoned, the heating or cooling can be shut off to avoid heating or cooling them unnecessarily. Also offices or areas where tenants need less heating and cooling will only be heated or cooled upon demand. This all means less energy use.

• Cost savings. Precision heating and cooling makes for less energy wasted through the year. A zone control system can reduce the heating and cooling cost in a building by as much as 25 percent. Also, less HVAC system usage and stress means fewer repairs, another cost savings.

Contact Us for Your Zone Control System Needs

At ACS Air Conditioning Services here in Marana, AZ, we are HVAC zoning professionals. Please call us at 520-230-5668 or request service online today. We know how much is riding on your business and the regular care of your HVAC system.