If your air conditioner is too small for your home, it won't keep your family cool. Moreover, it will run continuously, and you'll pay more for utility bills. If it's too large, it will cool your home too fast and won't run long enough to remove moisture from the air; you could wind up with mold problems. Alabama Cooling & Heating, the leading HVAC services provider in Birmingham, explains below how to determine what size heating and cooling system is right for your situation.

Rule of Thumb

Many contractors use a rule of thumb to estimate the required size for an air conditioner system. They plug the square footage of the home into a simple formula to arrive at the necessary unit size.

The formula is: Unit Size = Square Footage / 600.

Thus, if your home comprises 2,400 square feet, you need a unit size of 2,400/600 = 4 tons. Each "ton" of air conditioner capacity can remove 12,000 BTUs of heat from a house per hour, so a 4-ton unit has a capacity of 48,000 BTUs per hour.

Load Calculation

However, the rule of thumb is not always very accurate and can result in a unit that is too small or too large for your home. The only way an HVAC service contractor can accurately size the required unit is to perform a load calculation.

This takes into consideration the windows (number and size), the home's square footage, the orientation of the building, the amount of insulation, the surface area of floors, and many other factors. It is time-consuming and mathematically complex, but it provides the most accurate numbers for heating and cooling size requirements.

Serving Anniston, Birmingham, Center Point, Pell City, Pinson, and Talladega, the highly trained HVAC service team at Alabama Cooling & Heating can perform a load calculation on your home to give you the most precise sizing information possible. Visit their website for contact details, or call (205) 980-8180 to request a consultation.