Congratulations, you’re a homeowner! You are the lord and/or lady of the manor. Along with all the social and financial benefits of home ownership, you’ve also become the climactic master of somewhere between ten and twenty thousand cubic feet of indoor space. Chances are that you’d like that space to be relatively comfortable, and if you’re like most other human beings, comfortable translates to a window of a few degrees on either side of 21°C (that’s 70 old school degrees).
You’d prefer that your indoor space remain this temperature regardless of outdoor conditions. You’d also likely prefer that the house be dry enough to prevent water from dripping down the walls, but humid enough that you don’t shock yourself on everything you touch. The ways you can meet your comfort desires, and how much you’ll pay to do so, are your introduction to the world of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning, or HVAC.
HVAC is a topic that most people do not think about on a daily basis. We go about our days, traveling from our room-temperature homes to our climate controlled office in our air-conditioned cars. We’ll sometimes notice the baseboard heater or the register in the bedroom, or perhaps the boiler around which we’ve neatly piled boxes in the basement. We might even catch a glimpse of a room full of pipes and exotic equipment when we track down the maintenance man at school. HVAC is an industry whose goal is to be unnoticed.
I have been working in the HVAC industry for the better part of a decade. I entered the field directly out of engineering school, and have been designing commercial, industrial, and institutional HVAC systems since 2004. My professional career has focused on larger buildings, as it is generally not economically feasible for a homebuilder to hire an HVAC consultant. Residential systems are simpler versions of larger HVAC systems, but they are not without their complexity or diversity. My goal throughout this series of blog posts will be to educate both the reader and myself on the variety of options that exist in the residential HVAC market.
We have a plethora of HVAC options in New Brunswick. You can heat with electricity, natural gas, oil, or wood. Your options don’t end when you pick a heat source – for example, using electricity you can choose baseboard electric heat, an electric furnace, an electric boiler, or a heat pump. One natural gas boiler will not use as much gas as another to produce the same amount of heat. Some systems can be integrated with solar heat. Others can be adjusted to produce less heat when outside temperatures are warmer. I’ll explore all these topics, and more, as summer turns to fall, when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of winter heat.
