You’ve seen the acronym HVAC, pronounced H-Vac, and you know it somehow relates to the heating and cooling system in your home. The H is for Heating and the AC is for Air Conditioning. Right in the middle is V for Ventilation. Your central ventilation system consists of ductwork that runs to the far corners of your home and the blower fans and motors that circulate warm or cool air.

Your heater and your air conditioner take a rest for part of the year, but your ventilation systems seldom gets a day off. Ventilation is the unsung and underappreciated hero of your HVAC system. Furnaces heat, air conditioners cool, and ventilation systems collect and deliver warm or cool air to keep your home comfortable year-round.

Your ventilation system doesn’t need much attention, but occasionally air ducts need to be cleaned. You have filters that need to be changed frequently to remove pollutants that are circulating in the air you breathe. But over time, dirt builds up inside the ducts and needs to be removed. The before and after pictures say it all.

Where does all of this dirt come from? If dust collects on your furniture, it circulates through your ventilation system. The dust that your home vacuum collects is dust that has made its way through your ductwork. Pet dander, smoking, water damage, remodeling construction, dirty shoes and dirty clothes all contribute to dirty ducts.

If you change your filters regularly, you can ignore your ducts and the rest of your ventilation system for a few years, but dirt will accumulate inside your ducts and the air you breathe will become unhealthy. Eliminating the dust, dirt, mold and other pollutants from your ductwork will improve indoor air quality, keep your home cleaner, and make your entire HVAC system more efficient. Your home air quality will substantially improve with professional duct cleaning.

Semper Fi Heating & Cooling has the experience and equipment to clean your ductwork and improve the quality of the home air that you breathe. Duct cleaning is a job for trained professionals. An inadequate vacuum system can release more contaminants than if you had left the ducts alone. Don’t expect immediate changes in your personal health, but do expect your home to be cleaner. A proper duct cleaning job will significantly reduce the dirt and contaminants in your home air.

What you should expect from the duct cleaning process:

• Before you start vacuuming, your system should be checked for asbestos-containing materials. Asbestos requires specialized procedures and should not be disturbed or removed except by specially trained and equipped contractors.
• Only equipment that exhausts particles outside the home or through HEPA filters should be used.
• The inside of ducts should be carefully brushed in conjunction with vacuuming.

There are steps you can take to reduce future buildup of dirt in your ductwork:

• Use high-efficiency furnace filters and change them frequently. If filters get clogged, change them even more frequently.
• When your unit is serviced, make sure that the cooling coils and drain pan are also cleaned.
• Remove dirt and dust from your home regularly, and use high-efficiency filters in your vacuum.

Duct cleaning will improve your indoor air quality, but cleaning is not the only issue related to ducts. By most estimates, as much as 30% of the air that goes into your ducts leaks out before being delivered to wherever the ducts lead. While getting your ducts cleaned, consider taking the next step and get them professionally sealed. You can look for leaks and slap a piece of duct tape over the gap, but that is not professionally sealing your ducts. You won’t eliminate the majority of leaks unless you have the right equipment to find the leaks and the right materials to seal them up.

Call the professional technicians at Semper Fi to learn more about duct cleaning, and check the website for special pricing.

Adequate and clean air flow is critical for the proper operation of your heating and air conditioning system. Without good air flow, your equipment will wear out quicker and your utility bills will be higher. The health of your family is at risk and the overall comfort of your home is reduced.

Clean Your Air Filter Regularly

The first step in keeping home air clean is to replace your air filter frequently. The general guideline is to replace the filter at least every three months. You may find that even more frequent replacement is needed; no two homes are the same. If your home air smells musty, change the filter. If your furniture gets dusty quickly after cleaning, it is probably time to change the filter. If your furnace is running more often and longer than you think it should, it might be an indication that filters need to be changed.

Filters should be replaced with the change of seasons. Switching from heating to air conditioning or from air conditioning to heating is a good time to change filters. For central Arizona, Semper Fi recommends a non-pleated, fiberglass filter. Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value (MERV) is the measurement system for a filter’s effectiveness in reducing airborne particles and contaminants. The higher the number from 1-20, the more effective the filter. However, the higher the number, the more the filter will restrict air flow. To determine the right MERV for your HVAC system, you should find the recommended maximum for your system and use a filter that is just below the maximum.

Fortify Your Air Filter With a REME HALO Systems

Air filters are important, but filters alone cannot remove mold, pollen spores, bacteria, mildew and odors. Semper Fi Heating & Cooling recommends installing the REME HALO, which uses reflective electromagnetic energy to produce hydrogen peroxide plasma that passes through your air handler and circulates through your whole house. Hydrogen peroxide occurs naturally. It is part of the process of purifying the clean, outdoor air that we breathe. The hydrogen peroxide produced by REME HALO continues to eliminate pollutants on surfaces in your home, even when the blower on your HVAC system is not running.

A REME HALO system partners with your filtration system to capture the pollutants that are circulating in your home air. It also kills and eliminates the pollutants before they circulate. It works with your filtration system by causing particle pollutants to solidify and stick together, making them larger and easier for your filter to catch. That is another reason to change your filter often.

Mold, pollen spores, bacteria, odors, and other dangerous pollutants can also be removed with UV-C light installed in your duct system. Ultraviolet light in wavelengths between 200 and 300 nanometers are proven to destroy harmful microorganisms by altering their DNA and removing their ability to replicate.

REME HALO and UV-C lighting are both proven to be effective and can be installed quickly by the professionals at Semper Fi. They come with a five-year warranty. It is recommended that the hydrogen peroxide-producing cell be replaced every two years. Call the professional HVAC technicians at Semper Fi today to learn more about how clean air flow along with air purification can reduce the pollutants in the air that is circulating in your home. Purified air circulation will help keep your family healthy and safe.

Conditional air filters do a great job with most particulate pollution. Unfortunately, in the extreme heat of Arizona, high-efficiency filters can starve an HVAC system of the airflow it needs to provide maximum indoor home comfort. For home comfort optimization during peak heat during Arizona summers, Semper Fi recommends a non-pleated, fiberglass filter. For customers with indoor air quality concerns, there are additional options for the homeowner in need of hospital-quality air purification without the use of high-efficiency, pleated filters that can restrict airflow.

Bipolar Ionization

Bipolar Ionization splits molecules in the air, including water vapor, into positively and negatively charged ions. The opposite charges attract each other to form a compound. The positive and negative ions surround air particles, and the added mass causes the air particles to be captured by an air filter and removed from the air. The positive and negative ions also surround and pull hydrogen away from pathogens like viruses, bacteria, and mold spores. With the hydrogen pulled away from the protein coat, the virus cannot infect. With bacterium or mold, when the essential hydrogen is removed, the cell is ripped open and the pathogen dies, preventing infection.

Electrostatic Air Filters

Electrostatic Air Filters are most often used to remove dust, dander, mold, or pollen from an indoor space. Along with regular cleaning and adequate ventilation, an electric air cleaner installed into your HVAC system can help make your home more allergen-free. Electrostatic filters are magnets for dust. Like the positive and negative sides of a magnet that attract each other, the particles passing through a filter are given an electrical charge before they pass plates in the filter where they are attracted to the opposite charge. Under ideal conditions, the pollen and other allergens floating in your home air get stuck to the plates and are removed from the air circulating in your home.

However, everyday conditions are not ideal. The electrostatic filters need to be cleaned regularly. More importantly, continuous use of electrostatic filtration will raise the level of ozone in a home and cause other problems for anyone who suffers from allergies.

There is another solution. Allergy filters that come with an electrostatic charge will attract and hold dust, dander, mold, and pollen. These filters are flat rather than the more common pleated filters. They are also less expensive than high MERV-rated HEPA filters. The drawback is that eventually they will reach their load capacity and need to be changed. Unlike pleated filters, they can be washed and reused.

Ultraviolet Light Air Purification

Ultraviolet Light Air Purification is a viable alternative for scrubbing viruses and other pathogens from home air. UV light is the shortest wavelength light; you know it as the part of sunlight that causes sunburn. With home air purification, you are not directly exposed to the UV light; it is installed in your ventilation duct system, downstream of a high-quality air filter.

After a day at the beach, you will likely experience radiation burns resulting in redness of your skin. The redness is a direct result of damage to your skin from UV radiation. In moderate quantities, it is relatively harmless. Extreme exposure can cause skin cancer. Unlike our skin, bacteria are sensitive to even small amounts of UV exposure. They are harmless after effective exposure to germicidal ultraviolet light.

For a whole home installation, the UV lights will be installed inside ductwork and will not be directly exposed to you. The bulbs in UV lights generally need to be changed once a year but vary by manufacturer.

Semper Fi Heating & Cooling can help you choose from these and other home air purification systems to find the system that is right for your family.

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Let’s Start with Definitions

Just to be a stickler for language and definitions, let’s offer two definitions directly from Wikipedia:

• • Freon is a registered trademark of The Chemours Company, which uses it for a number of halocarbon products. They are stable, nonflammable, low-toxicity gases or liquids which have generally been used as refrigerants and as aerosol propellants. These include the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that cause ozone depletion. Freon is a brand name for the refrigerants R-12, R-13B1, R-22, R401A, R502, and R-503

• manufactured by The Chemours Company.
• The term “freon” is also a generic descriptor of a fluorocarbon refrigerant.

To put it another way, Freon is a brand name and a registered trademark of a refrigerant widely used in air conditioning systems. CFCs are a component of that refrigerant that has been banned as a cause of ozone depletion. The word freon lives on as a generic word for any refrigerant used in air conditioners.

Specifically, the CFC R-22 is banned from manufacturing or importing into the United States. But there are many air conditioning systems still operating with Freon R-22. Freon R-22 has become in increasingly short supply and as a result the price has increased significantly. Typically Freon R-22 is 300-400% more expensive than the current standard Freon 410A. Newer systems have not been using Freon R-22 for a decade.

Should Older Systems that Use R-22 Be Replaced?

If your system uses R-22, then it is older and possibly nearing the end of efficient operational life. It may still have some useful years, and if it continues to perform well there is not an immediate rush to replace it. You should, however, get regular maintenance and keep your older system operating until it becomes time for a replacement.

In the normal course of operation, an air conditioning system can lose a small amount of Freon every year. During your semi-annual maintenance visit, it is not uncommon for your HVAC technician to recommend a “top-up” of the refrigerant levels on your system. The challenge occurs if there is a significant refrigerant leak in a Freon R-22 system. In this instance, even if the leak in the system can be repaired, it will most likely be cost-prohibitive to recharge (i.e. refill) the system with Freon R-22 and thus a system replacement is most commonly the best course of action at that time. Remember, in this instance it is not that Freon R-22 is not available, but that it is so expensive that investing several thousand dollars in additional Freon R-22 does not make financial sense for homeowners.

The service technicians at Semper Fi can help you understand your options with regard to freon availability. We are here to help you get as much life out of your older system as practically possible and offer competitive, cost-effective system replacement options as needed.

What Does Freon Do in Your Air Conditioning System?

Freon passes through your AC refrigerant lines. The air conditioner compressor compresses freon gas which makes it hot. It then travels through coils that cool and convert it from gas to a liquid state. Next, it travels to evaporators that convert it back to gas that can cool the air in your home.

After years of circulating, the amount of freon in your system will decline. Tiny pinhole leaks will allow freon to escape and make the pressure in the system decline. When people refer to an AC system needing to be recharged or refilled, they are referring to the levels of freon. If your system is running longer than it did in the past, or if it seems that your system is not keeping you as cool as you expect, it could be that the freon needs to be recharged.
Call Semper Fi to make an appointment for a technician to check your system’s freon levels and add whatever is needed to get your system back to working like new at full efficiency.