Coastal Storms – Emerald Coast, FL
Living on the Emerald Coast means that you must handle home and also your business building maintenance a little differently than your friends that don’t live the salt life. One of these issues is how coastal storms can affect your heating and air conditioning system. Frequent strong pop-up storms, weather fronts, and even hurricanes can all affect your heating and air conditioning system. These storms can produce strong winds, flying debris, local flooding, and also humidity levels that can change drastically.
Winds, Rain, and Debris – Storm Damage
Strong winds can cause all kinds of debris to strike your outdoor heat pump unit. After any strong wind event, it’s a good idea to look at your outdoor air conditioning unit. Inspect the system to make sure no damage has occurred on the unit’s sides or top. Dents, exposed fins, shiny metal, or also broken fan louvers; can mean that something significant hit your outdoor air conditioning unit. Blowing sand can also act like a strong industrial sandblaster that constantly erodes outdoor unit metals, fins, and copper lines. Have you noticed any damage, heard unusual noises, seen new shiny metal, or does your unit does not seem to be working quite right? If so then, it’s a good idea to get the unit checked out by one of our HVAC experts as quickly as possible.
Coastal Storm Flooding and Damage
Local flooding can also cause significant damage to indoor and also outdoor units. Anytime you receive flooding water levels anywhere near your residence or business, all your mechanical systems need to be checked. Your heat pump systems are not designed to be flooded with any amount of water. Electrical connections, heating elements, internal thermostats, electrical switches and more can quickly be affected by being submerged in water for just a few hours. Anytime you experience any flooding around your home or business; it’s important to have one of our technicians come out and check your HVAC systems.
Heavy Storms and Humidity Levels
Heavy storms can also mean very high humidity levels. This humidity affects how your unit operates and can mean your air conditioning system may take much longer to lower indoor temperatures. A heat pump system lowers the indoor air by removing two types of heat from the home or business. These are sensible heat and also latent heat. Sensible heat is what causes the air temperature to change. Latent heat is humidity or water suspended in the air. Your heat pump must remove the latent heat as well as the sensible heat in order to lower the indoor temperature. The latent heat is what causes all air conditioners or heat pumps to create condensation; therefore producing the water to drain.
Coastal storms can cause drastic increases in latent heat and this will affect your air conditioning system until the system can remove the added latent heat. In order to make sure your air conditioning system can remove as much latent heat as possible, change your indoor filters regularly and try to minimize indoor humidity from entering the space through opened doors and windows.
Emerald Coast Storms
Coastal storms are a part of the life on the Emerald Coast and sometimes these storms can have big effects on your heating and cooling system. Anytime your HVAC unit is struck, makes a funny noise, or does not seem to be cooling correctly, it is best to have one of our technicians come out and perform a thorough check up on your system. Catching problems early can prevent small problems from becoming big ones and help save you serious money.
Mills Heating and Air – Local HVAC Emerald Coast, FL
Call Mills Heating and Air today and let us perform a thorough heat pump checkup to make sure our summer storms didn’t leave a mark on your system.
