Preparing Your Home for Retirement

Are you building your own home? Congratulations! You get to customize almost every aspect of the house. Even if you're buying a specific model from a company catalogue, you'll get a choice regarding pretty much everything. One of those things may be the type of air conditioner you get in the home. Air conditioning really is becoming a necessity in many places as summers bring more heat waves. You'll want a system that is energy efficient and that is cost-efficient to maintain. Two contenders are the ductless mini-split and central air.

Mini Splits and Ease of Maintenance

Mini-splits may be the easiest to maintain, in terms of less inconvenience to the home's occupants, as you don't have to take the entire system offline when looking at most parts. You'll have a number of cooling units in rooms hooked up to one exterior unit; if the exterior unit needs maintenance, of course, then the entire system may have to be off. But as each of the interior cooling units undergoes maintenance, it won't affect the other units as each is on its own thermostat. And finally, those units are small. It won't take much time to do maintenance and keep them in good shape.

Fewer Devices Means Less to Break

The point of air conditioner maintenance is to prevent the air conditioning from breaking down. Maintenance is when you do both general care and preventive repairs, such as replacing items that look old or worn out, like filters. A point in central air conditioning's favor is that with one compressor unit, one thermostat, and one condenser coil for the house, there's not much to maintain. Maybe there are a lot of filters to change in a big house, but that's it. So, there's not as much that can get old and break when compared to a mini-split system.

With mini-splits, you could have one cooling unit inside in a small house, but in a big house, you could have several interior units. And the more cooling units you need, the more exterior compressor and condenser units you'll need. That adds up to more maintenance time and more parts that could break.

You may actually want to contact some air conditioning companies and see which system has caused them the most heartache when they were asked to do the maintenance. Take their advice to heart as you consider which type of air conditioning to have added to your new home. 

For more information about air conditioning maintenance, contact a local company.