So another cold front has set in Florida.  People are already adjusting  orange juice prices on the shelves and pulling the fur coats from storage.

What I need to bring up is the furnace/HVAC issue.  Let me explain – I’m originally from Louisville, Kentucky.  Throughout my life I have pretty much lived where there are very distinct seasons.  One thing that this promotes is servicing your HVAC unit.  Yes – HVAC.

You see, you don’t have just an Air Conditioner… you have a Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning Unit… HVAC.  The beast in your utility closet has 4 Functions.

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   1. Air Conditioning.   Here in Florida, we NEED Air Conditioning.  Especially down here in South Florida where technically we live in the Tropics.  The only way to survive in the constant warm weather – and to sleep at night – is to have a machine that cools down your atmosphere.  We have them at home, at work and in our cars.
   2. Ventilation.  There is no AC – and no comfort whatsoever if there is no ventilation.  That big machine moves the air around and ventilates your space.
   3. Heating.  Yes… for a couple hours a year, literally, we in South Florida need to heat our homes.  I actually laugh when I hear people talking about putting on their heaters because I have yet to experience weather cold enough to bring the temperature inside my house to that low a temperature that I would need to pay to bring up the heat when the sun and other things in my house will do it for me. (the other people in my house feel differently though!)
   4. Polluting. HAHA you say??? No! Not Haha… because even I am likely to neglect my HVAC unit and take its precious service in cooling my abode for granted – I do not clean it often enough!! 

So… think about this: Dirty ductwork, dirty coils, dirty heating and cooling elements, warm and humid weather, lots of construction… what does that breed?? DUST, MOLD and MILDEW… yes your HVAC is full of that garbage.

Before you have a psychosomatic allergy attack or get a throbbing headache because “You’re Allergic to Mold”… believe me… The Mold has been here longer than we and it will survive after we nuke ourselves to death and it will probably mutate to create the lifeform that will replace us when we’re ash.  Mold is not a problem. BLACK Mold is. Bread Mold is…

So what are we to do?? 

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   1. First of all… clean your HVAC units!  We don’t get “Winter Weather” until January so it can wait until the first of the year. 
   2. Second… replace your filter more often
   3. Third… test it
   4. Fourth… learn to operate that unit!

Operating the unit means knowing how to turn it on and off, set the temperature… and how to RESET the unit!  You must RESET the HVAC to properly switch from COOLING 99.5% of the year to HEATING 00.5% of the year (at most).  To RESET your HVAC:

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   1. TURN IT OFF COMPLETELY AT THE THERMOSTAT
   2. TURN IT OFF COMPLETELY AT THE POWER SWITCH ON THE UNIT
   3. LET IT SIT IDLE FOR AT LEAST 30 MINUTES… this is a great time to change your filter!!
   4. TURN IT TO THE NEW SETTING FROM COOL TO HEAT or vice versa

WHY?!??!?!  BECAUSE IT IS A FIRE HAZARD NOT TO!

Last year during the last cold weather,  my wife convinced me that we HAD to take precaution that it was going to BECOME too cold for our 1 year old son.  So to allay her fears that he would get too cold and get sick, I turned off the AC but did not reset the unit.  I knew it was getting warm the next day and I honestly did not believe the house would drop in temperature that far.  I set the thermostat to 72 degrees and switched it to heat.  That was SO STUPID of me.

What happened?  At 6 am, the heater kicked on.  The air started blowing and all the dust that had been sitting idle in the heating coils incinerated.  It sounds horrible but it smells worse.  It also set off the smoke detectors.  The baby got scared, my dogs freaked out…. and my wife got scared that the whole place would burn down.

It was more unpleasant than anything… BECAUSE I HAD HAD MY UNIT SERVICED.  Sure, it stunk of burnt dust… and it irritated our throats.  But it could have been a LOT worse.  It could have started a fire and with the Red Flag Warnings spread through several houses.

Tips for warming your house WITHOUT turning on the heater:

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    • Swap out your Energy Efficient Fluorescent Bulbs for Incandescent…. oh stop griping you hippies! Incandescent bulbs can actually heat your house! Ever notice how hot they are when you touch one? They can singlehandedly keep your house warm.  After the weather warms, switch back to fluorescent and then you can bring down your COOLING bill during the warm months.
    • Open your drapes… duh – sunlight!
    • Get a small ceramic disk heater… even in cold weather cities people use these instead of heating a whole house at night, they heat a room or two.  Keep it on something fire resistant and away from drapes, pets and children.  On low, you’ll be fine at night.
• Turn on your stove or oven… it sounds stupid but that’s how people used to do it.  My oven has a convection mode which has a fan…. it blows the air into the room faster making my kitchen warmer.  Most consumer grade ovens vent indoors so the heat will move into the kitchen.
• Move around… body heat will warm the room so quickly.  Notice how hot your house gets when full of your friends and how cold it gets about 30 min after they leave??
• Layer… several layers of warm

Things NOT to do:

• Forget to change your filters! Pick up extras at Publix, Target, Walgreens, Lowes or Home Depot and keep it clean all year round
• Warm the room with candles…
• Leave anything heat related on when you are not in the house…
• Crank up the heat all the way… truthfully, it will use more power to crank your heat up and get the house up to temperature than to just use another method because the power consumption of the HVAC unit on high is more than any of the other method here.  Moving up or down is where the HVAC uses the most power – staying at one level uses the least so resisting raising and lowering at any time is more expensive than keeping it at one point all the time. 

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David A. Podgursky, MBA
The Mortgage Go To Guy!
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