In my experience as a HAVC contractor at newtons heating and air conditioning and as a HVAC technician i can safely say i get the question all of the time, should i get a heat pump or a straight cool system for my heating system replacement? Both types of equipment have their pros and cons but what i will be primarily talking about today is straight cool equipment. straight cool systems are just units that just use electric heat for their main heating source. The first benefit of straight cools system are they are more basic and have less parts that can break on them compared to a heat pump system. This also makes them a bit cheaper then heat pump. Heat pumps systems are a bit more complicated and have a defrost board and a reversing valve and both of these items can get costly to fix but these items make them much more energy efficient for heating. There are a couple of draw backs though for a straight cool system. The most common problem with them is that they don’t have a big enough heat strip in order to heat your home. The sizes or the ratings of the heat strips go in something called kw. This abbreviation means kilowatt. Heating strips come in 4 typical sizes for most residential homes in Florida. 5kw, 7.5kw, 8 kw and lastly 10kw. The bigger the heat strip in kilowatts the higher the heating potential they have. A 5 kw which is the smallest heater can typically warm a home that is very small, ideally around 500 to 600 square feet. This is a good fit for maybe a small 1 bed 1 bathroom apartment. That can be a problem if you have a large home. How they operate is they have a heating element that glows bright orange or red. Kind of what it looks like on the inside of your toaster. The draw back of that is they are not very energy efficient. Think of it like your microwave running non stop for your heat source or maybe turning on your oven and just opening the door to heat your home. With all of that being said why don’t all systems just come with a 10kw heat strip so that it can heat every home? The answer might surprise you but its actually because of the electric wiring in your home. The bigger the kilowatt the more it pulls in amps. You can kind of think of amps as a measurement of how much electricity your unit is consuming. So the wire that goes to your straight cool unit is measured in something called gauge. You can think of the gauge of the wire as the thickness of the high voltage wire. Weirdly they go down in size in numerical order as the wire gets thicker. Meaning a wire that is 6 gauge is thicker than a wire that is 8 gauge. The lower the gauge of wire the more amps it can have going through it. So a 5kw pulls less amps than say a 10kw heat strip. A 10kw actually pulls double the amps of a 5Kw! So what happens if you put a 10kw heat strip on a wire that isn’t meant for more than a 5kw heat strip? it actually melts the wire and makes the wire catches on fire! I have actually seen this happen in the field. Your breaker panel has breakers that rated in amps. If it pulls to many amps than the breaker pops and shuts of the electric. So the breaker is sized to what the wire size that, it can handle to prevent the wire from ever catching on fire. So what did i see in the field and how did it happen? They just made the breaker bigger and not the wire and you guessed it, it caught on fire! So its very important to pick out a good HVAC contractor or HVAC technician for you heating system installation. If you liked this article and would like to see more you can visit us at www.newtonsheatingandairconditioning.com
Heating System Replacement Tips For People In Saint Pete, Clearwater, Largo Or All Of Pinellas County
