Is Your Air Conditioner Ready for the Hot Summer Weather?

It has been another one of those weeks.
You turned the air conditioner on before you went to bed on Sunday night, but by the time you went to sleep on Monday night you were back to the furnace. In fact, although the temperatures Sunday evening approached the low 80s, the thunderstorm that made its way through the area was an indication of the arriving cold front that dropped the early morning Tuesday temperatures below freezing again.
At least you can be thankful that the landscaping company sales person talked you out of buying and planting anything over the weekend. You tried though, but just as you were starting to load your small cart with some items that you were going to use to brighten up the area in front of the house, one of the workers came by and asked what you were planning. Even before you finished explaining your idea, he interrupted and pretty strongly suggested that you wait a few more weeks. He already knew, it seemed, what a roller coaster the temperatures were going to be in this second week of April.
Fortunately, just as the landscaping sales person kept you from making a costly mistake, your husband is just as cautious in his home maintenance tasks. Like clockwork, if there is a repair to be made in your home your husband takes care of immediately. And when it comes to the heating and cooling system in your home, he does not even pretend that any of those problems are something he can repair himself. Instead, he schedules regular maintenance appointments with the trained professionals. Perhaps that is why when you are running the air conditioner one day, but the furnace a night later everything works as it should.
Home HVAC systems are expensive, but if they are properly maintained they can be both efficient and dependable. In fact the newest air conditioning installations, although they can be pricey, actually help home owners safe money every single month because the are so much more cost effective than older models. Consider some of these facts and figures about some of the latest HVAC systems:

• By having routine maintenance checks, home owners can increase the efficiency of a system by as much as 25%.
• HVAC repairs if they are addressed immediately can keep a system working longer and more efficiently. In addition, twice a year checks can increase the life span of the average heating and air conditioning unit by of 30% to 50%.
• 41.5% of energy use in a U.S. home goes to heating.
• HVAC upgrades are also environmentally friendly. In fact, upgrading a furnace or boiler from 56% to 90% efficiency in an average home in a cold climate area will save 1.5 tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year if the home is heated with gas, or 2.5 tons if the home is heated with oil.