Air Conditioning Problem
I live in an apartment building for the last 5 years and my 25-30 year old central air unit died (compressor). Now the unit was replaced with a SEER 10.0 unit and I can no longer get the apartment down below 73-74 even at night. Is this normal? Now I have done a bunch of Google work over this and I have read the little tube (HIGH SIDE) should be warm to hot to the touch but mine is not. Matter of fact its room temperature at best but the big tube (LOW SIDE) is cold like a soda that was just pulled out of the refridgerator. What should the little hose feel like and if it should be hot what can I tell my maintainence men so they will take me seriously that there is a problem. With 2-3 computers running in this room 78 degrees F is unacceptable when the previous 4 summers it was 70-72 in here (would get down to 62 easily if I let it at night or 66 in the day).
Answer:
Hello, no one from the net can see your system. I know you tried to provide good info. Maybe we can go a step at a time. Take a thermometer and get the temperature difference between the supply air and the return air. temperatures. The temp difference is your Delta-T. Tell your maint man, "here is my Delta-T reading". Now your using a tech term and sound like you know something. I think the PP meant to say that "an air conditioning system should provide an indoor environment supply temperature of approx. 15-20 F lower than the indoor return temperature at the time 'if' it is properly sized and functioning correctly." So, if it's 100F in the apartment, the air coming out of the vents oughta be about 80. Also depends on humidity. If the air is very humid, you will get less temp drop because the system is using a lot of power to remove humidity. I'm sorry we can't be more help. I'm thinking at this point that you might have an under sized system, wrong orifice, wrong ammount of freon in the system, or any of a list of things. All of them take a technician to do much about it. I know the feeling. I just faxed over a copy of an estimate for taking over the preventive service on a large company here...we actually DO what we say, and after spending 4 hours there just looking these units over, its obvious as hell that the company that was servicing them is a crook. They were getting $5600 a month..(cheap actually for these units...air filters alone cost wholesale over $2200) and they look like they have never been touched. Shame too, since they probably think they are in GREAT shape, and wont like my estimate of 6200....but hey...in this biz, if you have someone that has a clue, do you get what you pay for...