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Learning the language of Heating and Cooling! Commonly asked questions: What is a SEER?
As of January, 2006, an air conditioner must have a SEER of at least 13 to be sold in the United States. Higher efficiency models have a SEER of up to 21. HVAC is an abbreviation for Heating, Ventilation and Air Conditioning. HVAC Contractors specialize in the installation and maintenance of furnaces, boilers, heat pumps and central air conditioners.
A ton of cooling capacity is the amount of cooling that would be provided by melting a ton of ice. Thus, a central air conditioning system that is rated as a 2-ton system would provide the same cooling as melting two tons of ice per hour. A ton is equal to 12,000BTUs. Thus, a 2-ton air conditioner is equivalent to a 24,000 BTU air conditioner. BTU stands for British Thermal Unit. A BTU is the quantity of heat required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. AFUE is short for Annual Fuel Utilization Efficiency. It is the most widely used measure of a furnace's heating efficiency. It measures the amount of heat actually delivered to your house compared to the amount of fuel that you must supply to the furnace. Thus, a furnace that has an 80% AFUE rating converts 80% of the fuel that you supply to heat -- the other 20% is lost out of the chimney. Note that the AFUE refers only to the unit's fuel efficiency, not its electricity usage. The US Department of Energy (DOE) determined that all furnaces sold in the US must have a minimum AFUE of 78%, beginning January 1, 1992. Mobile home units are required to have a minimum AFUE of 75%. What does MERV stand for? The Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value is the standard comparison of the efficiency of an air filter. The MERV scale ranges from 1 (least efficient) to 16 (most efficient), and measures a filter's ability to remove particles from 3 to 10 microns in size.
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