Category Archives: Energy

HVAC systems play a pivotal role in maintaining comfort in homes throughout the year. However, after doing an AC installation, these systems require regular maintenance to operate efficiently. An unmaintained HVAC unit can significantly affect your home’s energy consumption, leading to higher utility bills and a reduced lifespan of the system. Understanding the impact of neglected HVAC maintenance and knowing how to address it can help homeowners save money and energy while ensuring a comfortable living environment.

Impact of Unmaintained HVAC Systems on Energy Efficiency

Increased Energy Consumption: An HVAC system that hasn’t been maintained will have to work harder to heat or cool your home. This inefficiency arises because of dirty filters, clogged ducts, or aging components which strain the system, requiring more energy to achieve the desired temperature, thereby increasing energy consumption. If your system has any of these symptoms, you can get ac repair bellevue wa to enhance your system’s energy efficiency.

Poor Temperature Regulation: When HVAC systems are not regularly checked, issues such as leaking ducts, low fluid levels, or faulty thermostats can arise. These problems lead to poor temperature regulation and uneven heating or cooling, causing the system to run longer cycles to maintain comfort, further increasing energy use.

Short Cycling: Short cycling is when the HVAC unit turns on and off more frequently than normal. This often happens when the air conditioner is oversized for the space or when crucial components like the thermostat or compressor are malfunctioning due to lack of maintenance. Short cycling puts immense pressure on the system, leading to higher energy consumption and potential system failure.

Reduced Lifespan of the Unit: Without regular Honolulu ac tune up, the wear and tear on HVAC components accelerate. This not only leads to inefficiencies but can also shorten the lifespan of the system, requiring earlier than expected replacements. When this happens, it’s important to consult professionals to do an AC replacement.

What You Can Do About It

Regular Maintenance Checks: The most effective way to ensure your HVAC system is running efficiently is to schedule regular professional maintenance checks done by experts that do AC maintenance in Fontana, CA. Ideally, these checks should be done twice a year; once in the spring before the summer heat kicks in and once in the fall before the winter cold starts. These maintenance checks include cleaning or replacing air filters, checking and refilling coolant levels, inspecting and cleaning ducts, and ensuring all mechanical parts are in good working condition.

Change Air Filters Regularly: Air filters should be checked monthly and changed at least every three months. Dirty air filters restrict airflow, causing the system to expend more energy to circulate air. Keeping air filters clean helps maintain efficient system performance and air quality in your home.

Seal and Insulate Ductwork: Leaky ducts can significantly increase energy bills by forcing your HVAC system to work harder. Sealing ductwork and ensuring it is well insulated can improve system efficiency by up to 20%, according to the U.S. Department of Energy.

Upgrade to a Smart Thermostat: Installing a smart thermostat can optimize HVAC operation by adjusting the temperature based on your daily schedule and preferences. Smart thermostats can detect when no one is home and adjust the temperature accordingly, saving energy in the process.

Consider System Upgrades: If your HVAC system is old and requires frequent repairs, upgrading to a more energy-efficient model can be cost-effective in the long run. Modern HVAC systems are designed to be more energy-efficient and can significantly reduce your home’s energy consumption.

By recognizing the importance of HVAC maintenance and taking proactive steps to ensure its efficiency, homeowners can not only save on energy costs but also enhance the comfort and air quality of their living spaces.

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Let’s say you live in Florida. Yes, I know, that requires us to assume you are pretty oblivious to the rising seas and corrosive stupidity assailing the state from every direction, but let’s just say you live in Florida. No offense.

You’re smart enough to know that life in Hurricane Alley could get difficult, and you live after all in the Sunshine State, so you installed solar panels on your roof, enough to run your house, just in case. Now, we just assumed you were dense enough to choose to live in Florida, so let’s assume, on the other side of the ledger, that you are smart enough to have avoided some of the major pitfalls of the rooftop solar business.     Continue reading →

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(Photo by Gideon Wright/Flickr)

One of the most potent forces acting to destabilize the world is seldom mentioned, let alone acknowledged, by corporate journalists or industrial politicians. It is so unfamiliar to Americans as to be virtually invisible, and requires a somewhat lengthy introduction.

Let’s start with the worst exemplar — Saudi Arabia. For many decades, Saudis have enjoyed the cheapest gasoline and diesel-fuel prices on the planet — in 2011, gas sold there for 57 cents a gallon. Now it costs 91 cents. (Think about that for a minute: while world oil prices have dropped to less than half what they were in 2011, the price of Saudi gas has nearly doubled?) Continue reading →

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Concentrated solar power — in which sunlight is focused to boil water, for example, which then is used to generate power — is the highest industrial form of renewable energy. And is turning out to be a very big mistake.

When a practice arises that is detrimental to the profits of industry — you know, any practice that helps to heal the planet and its human occupiers — industry has a long-practiced, graduated response. First it ignores, then it attacks, and if all else fails it co-opts, and having co-opted, advertises heavily.

Organic farming, for example, was first ignored as a fad, then derided as “no way to feed the world,” then co-opted. Now every other box and package in any supermarket, including cow milk and chicken parts, bears the label “organic.” And by this stage, you know it’s a lie. When asked if he would seek federal certification as an organic grower (federal certification follows industrialization, as the flies the garbage) Joel Salatin famously replied that he would never lower his standards that much.

Another example: Do you remember what happened to the first mass produced electric car, General Motors’s EV1, when the idea was first recognized by industry back in the 1990s? Yeah, me neither, and I drove one. Continue reading →

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San Francisco, noon, April 21, 2017. Traffic not moving, buildings dark. Similar things happening in New York and Los Angeles. Was it the Russians? No? Then forget about it.

Last Friday, the lights went out in New York. And San Francisco. And Los Angeles. Not all the lights, and not all day, but still. It’s only April, three months before the summer heat challenges the electric grid to within an inch of its life, as the summer does every year. Three serious outages in three major cities seems like grist for the cable news mill, wouldn’t you think, with talking heads wall to wall saying things like, “Well, I know nothing about it, and none of us will for days, but it could have been a Russian cyber attack.”

That happened, of course, but only on a handful of conspiracy-loving, fake-news-peddling, objectivity-challenged publications. Like the Washington Post and the New York Times. (Just kidding. They didn’t pay much attention to the story at all.) Let us look at what happened, as exactly as we can, and then consider how it was handled. Continue reading →

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Experienced con artists — the people who write clickbait ads, manage political campaigns and shake down old people for what’s left of their life’s savings —  will tell you that people who get conned, want to be conned. Many, many people go through their lives straining to hear the magic words; “You deserve to be rich,” or “Someone has to win the lottery, why not you?” or “cure cancer with one simple trick.” And when they hear those words, they experience the irrational exuberance of long-denied, at-last-confirmed faith, and are likely to do anything they are asked to do by those who have fulfilled the prophecy.

That’s the way it has gone with one of the longest and most successful cons in American history — the New American Oil Revolution, aka the Fracking Revolution. “You deserve all the cheap oil you can use,” the frackers began to croon about a decade ago, “America deserves energy independence.” People who had always wanted those things, and thought they deserved those things, sat up and took notice as the con artists set the hook: “we can have it forever with one simple trick of technology.” Continue reading →

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The two articles appeared within 48 hours of each other. One was produced by Bloomberg News, one of the most respected names in traditional journalism. The other appeared in Oilprice.com, a veteran and well respected source of objective news about the oil industry. No one has ever credibly accused either of these organizations of producing “fake news.” Yet when each of them decided to publish an assessment of the state of the American shale oil industry in the first week of March, 2017, the two articles were diametrically opposed in all their conclusions. Continue reading →

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Finally, after 130 years or so, we’re thinking about a better way to handle electricity than with strings strung on sticks. (Wikimedia Photo)

For those of us who have been arguing into the wind for years about the urgent need to abandon our total reliance on the electric grid in favor of distributed energy — making it where you use it — it’s a sight for sore eyes. An enormous government program is building tens of thousands of direct-current microgrids to power homes and businesses and towns all over the country, providing people with electricity that is far less expensive and more reliable than is provided by the grid.

The program began field testing its microgrids just three years ago. For a single household it consisted of a solar array, a basic battery, and a 12-volt wiring harness. By staying in 12 volt, the microgrid avoids the expense and inefficiencies of inverting the power to 120-volt, and makes use of the increasing availability of 12-volt lights, motors, computers, TVs and appliances.  By the end of of this year, 100,000 microgrids will be up and running, with no slowdown in sight.

Another triumph of American ingenuity? Hardly. You can have America’s grid when you pry it from our cold, dead hands. This is a triumph of Indian innovation. Continue reading →

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Blackout 1965: Think of it — all those people trapped in all those apartments, needing to know: how much is this going to cost?

According to a new study, if a solar storm blew out most of America’s electric grid, it would cost us $41.5 billion dollars. The worst scenario calculated in the study would affect 66 per cent of the population, as well as the nation’s manufacturing, government and finance sectors. Other countries would be affected as well, but we don’t care about that, the study simply created a seven-billion-dollar chump-change jar for the foreigners. After putting a price tag on every imaginable aspect of Apocalypse Now, one of the study’s authors said somberly, “We felt it was important.” He found it “surprising” that prior studies — yes, there are prior studies making the same calculations — lacked “transparency” and missed entirely some direct and indirect costs.

Encyclopedic as it may be, and transparent as well — you can see right through it — the study raises at least as many questions as it answers [Please disengage your fake-news sensor and engage your irony alert]: Continue reading →