DIGITAL & PROGRAMMABLE THERMOSTATS:

These are a perfect item to add to any system, new or existing. Most homes have older design mercury bulb or other mechanical thermostats installed. Switching to a digital thermostat does 2 things for you: gets mercury out of the home - a safety issue, and gets you an accurate thermostat. Most mechanical thermostats allow a several degree spread between on & off. That means your house temperature can vary enough between heat or cool cycles to affect your comfort. Good digital thermostats, manual or programmable, hold the temperature very even for the best possible level of comfort. The temperature you set is what you get and the thermometer in the thermostat is accurate with the actual temp in the room. PROGRAMMABLE thermostats allow you to tell the thermostat in advance what temperatures you want during different periods of the day. Wake up, go to work, return from work & sleeping are the most common times to set in the thermostat. No need to keep the house at warm or cool while you are away. And many like it cooler when they are sleeping. These thermostats do just that, automatically! And save 5-15% on your energy bills too! Yes, you can get a variety of thermostats at any home or hardware store. But, accuracy and especially reliability suffers. Low end consumer thermostats are a good source of service income for us when they fail (and they do $$ frequently) and the homeowner calls us to find out why the system isn't working. We sell the contractor lines of White-Rodgers & Honeywell and have had excellent results from them. We can come out and install one for you or sell you a stat to install yourself.

WHOLE HOUSE HUMIDIFIERS:

An accessory that can be of benefit to many homes. Why? Most homes have a considerable amount of cold air leaking in. Around windows, doors, when the home's doors are opened. As this air infiltrates, it is eventually heated by the heating system and since warm air can hold much more moisture than cold, the relative humidity of this air that leaked in is greatly lowered. So air that is 70% RH at 20 out suddenly becomes 20% RH at 70 in. Close, anyway, for those who are picky. The more air that leaks in, the drier it is in the home. Older homes, especially with low efficiency heating systems, have lowest moisture. Some new homes, with electric heat or sealed combustion 90+ furnaces, actually can have too much moisture. But anyway, assume you need a humidifier. These mount on the duct system by the furnace and are connected to water and electricity (and the furnace.) A "humidistat" comes with them to allow you to select the desired moisture level in your home. Some models even have a smart humidistat that senses outdoor temp and adjusts moisture accordingly. No worries! Installed cost of these humidifiers runs from $435 to around $600 depending upon brand & model and your existing system. Our primary brand is General but we can get models from Aprilaire & Honeywell too. Call or e-mail for further info.

WHOLE HOUSE AIR CLEANERS:

Here's an accessory that can benefit EVERY home! Remember the TV ads that showed you what was in your air? Pretty scary! If you use a 79 cent throwaway filter or a cheap washable model, upwards of 93% of what passes through that filter in your air is NOT stopped. It gets put back into your house where dust particles can land on furniture and mold & pollen floats around and you breathe it! The cute little guy on the right is a dustmite. You have plenty of them! And most filters are ignoring them. There are several alternatives. Just using a $4 "pleated" filter available at any hardware or home store can pick up 3-4 times what the cheaper models get. But you do have to change them frequently or you reduce airflow. Also something you can buy yourself are the "allergy" filters heavily advertised. Listen to Paul Harvey? Them! But most are so air restricting they make it difficult for your system to heat & cool the house. That costs!!!

 We have 2 alternatives that we can install on most systems. The unit illustrated is a media air cleaner. These use a throwaway material that is put in a cabinet our sheet metal installers permanently mount in your return air duct. This material has a considerable surface area, 78 sq feet in the model shown. This allows for changes that can be as long as a year. Also the material is very fine trapping dust and pollen (the   little monster on the left) that most filters miss. We have a very high customer satisfaction level with this type of cleaner. They are very effective and homeowners love the fact that it is not a monthly headache. Let our technicians worry about it when they do annual preventive maintenance on the equipment. General Filters has introduced models available with activated charcoal which is an odor eliminator. 1 system can clean and deodorize the air!

The ultimate cleaner is the "electronic" air cleaner (not to be confused with the "electrostatic" type that most "allergy" filters are). There are 2 electronic types. Most use a power supply that raises standard house 120 volts to 5000 volts. Inside the cabinet instead of pleated paper you'll find metal "cells" with row after row of plates & fins. Remember that "opposites attract"? They do in air cleaners too. The power supply charges incoming particles one way and charges the plates in the cells the other way. Like a magnet, the particles, as small as .01 microns, visible only with an electron microscope. The electronic cleaners get very fine smoke particles, some viruses and other teeny particles that even the media cleaners miss. So if you want the cleanest possible air, you want an electronic air cleaner. But, they are expensive to install and do require you to wash the cells every  month, maintenance many homeowners don't like to do. If you don't, performance drops off dramatically. A new model from Aprilaire charges a media, like the above, to 16000 volts. It's rated at 94% effective down to .35 microns, invisible particles that cause allergies. With this you change a media once a year.  With any good filtering system, if you want clean air, keep the windows shut at all times & run your furnace blower continuously. 

Brands? For media cleaners we usually install Trion's Air Bear or the Aprilaire's SpaceGard units. For the electronic, we would suggest the Aprilaire 5000 media electronic cleaner. 

HEAT RECOVERY VENTILATORS:

You're going to be hearing a lot more about these guys in the future. How come? What do they do? Remember in the humidifier section, I pointed out that tight new homes may have a humidity problem? Too high in the winter, not too low. New homes have so little air infiltration that it gets stale inside. Cooking fumes & chemicals from everyday life & the house itself are trapped inside. Solution 1: open a window. Yup, expensive to let freezing cold or hot & humid air in that way but it does get fresh air in & stale odors and fumes out. Solution 2: get a heat (or energy) recovery ventilator. These boxes have 4 round pipes leading to them. 2 from your house ducts and 2 to outdoors. What are we recovering? Heat or cool from your house. In the winter, warm air is exhausted to outside. Before it gets out, however, an internal system in the HRV recovers much of that heat and transfers it to the cold, outside air the HRV is bringing in. So instead of 30 degree air coming in and 70 degree air being sent outside, the incoming air is nicely warmed, say to 55-60 degrees before entering your duct system. The reverse is true in the summer. So now you can have fresh air in your home without wasting heating & cooling costs. An energy recovery ventilator adds moisture energy to the equation. Some new homes are so tight that normal moisture from cooking, showering, laundry, can build up and the house be too damp in the winter. Not good for the house. These systems detect the build up and turn themselves on to bring in fresh air to ventilate & dry the house air. They are even more efficient at recovering energy from the indoor air before it is sent outside. These units can be installed in many existing homes and is a valuable accessory to ask a new home builder about when planning to start your dream home. There are many brands available, known names like Honeywell, Research Products (the Aprilaire & Space Gard people), Carrier, and many OEMs that make for furnace brands and sell on their own.

ZONING SYSTEMS:

Here's another accessory we'll be hearing more of. These systems are hard to install in current homes (impossible in many) but should be installed in most new homes if we could get cheap builders to worry more about your comfort than your kitchen cabinets. The complaint we hear in every multistory home and many large ranch-style homes: some parts are too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. Poor design from day one. And it is hard to make 1 system do a good job on a big home with 1 thermostat in 1 room. SO: have lots of thermostats. These systems can be as elaborate as you want (and can afford) but they do have to be done correctly. The idea is simple. Have at least 2 thermostats in different areas. 1 per floor in a multistory or break a ranch down between day & sleeping areas. Each area has its own duct system off the furnace. When an area needs heat or cool, the furnace or A/C is turned on and a damper opens (see picture above left) allowing air to that area. That way the area that doesn't need heating or cooling doesn't get too hot or cold just to make the other floor or area comfortable. This is a great comfort item and saves money too - you aren't heating & cooling areas that aren't occupied. ANY HOME BEING DESIGNED TODAY ought to have zoning designed in as it is built. It really doesn't add that much more cost to the home compared to the comfort it will bring you!!! The biggest brands are Honeywell's Trol-a-temp, Bryant & Carrier's own systems; Lennox "Harmony" and Zonex; but there are many others including locally designed Jackson Systems' products which we have used. Remember, building a new house - be sure to ask about zoning!