air conditioning

It will surprise the gentle reader not one iota to be informed that the worst time – the very worst time – to seek to purchase an air-conditioning system (be it portable or fully installed) is when a ‘heat dome’ is camped on top of one’s home town – when temperature records are a-tumbling day on day – when wildfires are breaking out faster than they can be brought under control…

…and when the forecast is for more of the same.

Oddly enough one is never the only person in such circumstances seeking to obtain said items or systems.

Nonetheless, on the first day that the temperatures soared unpleasantly towards the stratosphere (as documented in my last post) and we decamped to our basement, I called our heating/ventilation engineers and – when I eventually reached a real person rather than a voicemail box – asked to be added to the list (the long list) of those who would like to talk about air-conditioning. A week and a half later I had a call back and an appointment for a visit was set up – in the middle of August.

Well – we knew that it would not be quick – and also that by the time anything were to be installed it would probably be the middle of winter… whatever that looks like these days!

Now – as detailed in that last posting – when our inherited heat pump gave up the ghost some years back we replaced our furnace but went no further. We did – however leave in place the duct-work and necessary services such that a heat pump or air-conditioner could be added at some point in the future. Well – that point is now – and we are pretty certain that we are going for the latter – though our engineer may well try to sell us the former.

Our rationale is this: The house is good and warm during the winter and the gas bills are very reasonable. During the temperate parts of the summer we like to be able to throw our windows wide without having to worry about interfering with whatever a cooling system is doing. If we have an air-conditioner (which would be much cheaper to install than a heat pump) we can leave it turned off except for those exceptional periods when it will prove a life-saver.

If we only run it when absolutely required it will not only cost considerably less to run, but it will also last a whole lot longer than if we run it all the time.

That, at any rate, is our plan at the moment. I will, naturally, issue an update in due course.

A few short posts back I was regaling ever patient readers with a description of life under the great North American ‘heat dome’. My intention to develop that thought into something related (but slightly off-topic) was overtaken by the tragic events in Lytton.

With (as ever) the reader’s kind permission – and given that I am always loathe to leave a notion only half-considered – I will just dot back to that thought now…

OK? Good!…

When we purchased our home here on the peninsula some six years ago it came with a heat pump. For those who do not know what a heat pump is, Wikipedia offers this explanation:

“A heat pump is a device used to warm and sometimes also cool buildings by transferring thermal energy from a cooler space to a warmer space using the refrigeration cycle, being the opposite direction in which heat transfer would take place without the application of external power. Common device types include air source heat pumps, ground source heat pumps, water source heat pumps and exhaust air heat pumps”.

A heat pump, then, is a sort of air-conditioner that works in both directions – taking heat out of the air during the summer and adding it in during the winter. Heat pumps are all the rage in these parts because they can offer considerable potential savings on heating costs in this sort of climate.

I say ‘potential savings’ because the amount of heat that such a pump can produce depends greatly on the type of device that has been chosen – and on that also depends the cost. Air source heat pumps are unable to deal with very low temperatures but are the cheapest to install. The other types do better with lower temperatures but cost a great deal more.

Systems such as the one we inherited use the relatively inexpensive air source pump but supplement it with a backup furnace – ours being an electric one. The problems that can occur with this sort of system became apparent a year or so after we moved in. The refrigerant circuit sprung a leak which went unnoticed until the electricity bill for a couple of months of electric furnace heating showed up, causing us to fall off our chairs with the shock.

We were advised that the old heat pump was not economical to repair (quelle surprise!) so we set about looking for an alternative. This was at about the same time that we were starting on the major renovations that were most fully documented within these pages. Being uncertain as to whether or not a straight replacement for the old heat pump was the best solution we chose instead a sort of halfway-house. We replaced the electric furnace with a modern efficient gas furnace and left space to add either a heat pump or an air conditioner should such prove necessary in the future.

Since then we have enjoyed a lovely toasty warm house during the winters for very reasonable gas costs – helped considerably by the replacement of most of the windows and the upgrading of the insulation during our renovations. Until this year the summers had not called for anything more than throwing the windows wide and turning on the ceiling fans.

This year – of course – has caused us to think again…

…but more on that next time…