Air Conditioner Not Cold Enough
For some reason this year my air conditioner is not producing enough cold air to cool the upstairs of my house. When I go to the ground floor there is enough cold air coming out, and it's nice and cold, but upstairs, it's too hot. I try to lower the thermostat to 70 degrees, and "cool" air comes out of the vents on the upstairs, but for some reason, the house is not cooling down enough to make the thermostat shut off. What's the most likely culprit?
Answer:
Clogged filters comes to mind, but there may be other causes. If a filter change does not correct it, call a service tech. There are many other possibilities and they are beyond what the average homeowner can do with simple tools. I closed the vents downstairs in hopes that the cold air would come up to the upper floors, but this has not helped. There does seem to be some cold air coming from the upstairs, so I'm confused as to why the upper floors are not getting cold enough. Is it possible that the air conditioning unit is not generating enough cold air? It seems cold enough downstairs. How would changing the filters or opening a vent change things. If it's generating enough cold air this should continue until the thermostat shuts it off, right? If you haven't changed anything but the upstairs is now hot but cold air is coming from vents, it's possible that there's now a hole in one of the ducts in the attic. An HVAC expert can point a thermometer at each vent and see if the air temp coming from each vent is what it's supposed to be. There's a bit of a difference between pointing a thermometer that's meant to be POINTED at a duct to read the temperature, and sticking a regular thermometer into the air flow to read the temperature. Some thermometers are meant to respond instantly to temp and some have to sit there for a while to read the temp properly. So yeah, while you don't have to be an HVAC expert to READ a thermometer, you do have to have some expertise to know which thermometer works with your particular circumstance.