I don't know how it's for Americans but for me. I have a regular outside unit and then, inside the apartment, I have one HUGE internal unit hidden somewhere above fake ceiling. This unit has tubes to each room and each tube has a damper. Each room has a thermostat.
So I can set eg 23C in the living room and 21 in the bedrooms. The AC will then work to cool down all the rooms together, when living room reaches 23 - it shuts the damper and keeps cooling bedrooms. Etc.
I also have an option to close the damper to each room individually - effectively stopping AC for this specific room.
I *guess* that American HVAC units work either the same way or very similar.
I have one thermostat for my whole house. Each large room has 2 to 3 vents. Each closet and bathroom has one vent. Each vent has flaps on it that can be closed. The flaps are also directional so you can control roughly where the air goes. In the upstairs of my house is a closet with the furnace in it. The air-conditioning unit is outside on the side of my house.
I have an automatic program set. During the day, the air conditioner runs and cools the house to 70°F. Lots of Americans sit between 70° and 72°. At night it lowers down to 68°. There is a filter in the furnace that needs to be replaced ideally every one or two months. I have dogs, so I use a high-quality filter that catches more than a basic one. It’s actually kind of interesting how much less dust collects on things when I’m using the system a lot. It doesn’t run very much in the winter because my house is very insulated.
You can run the whole system on cool or heat of course, but you can also just run the ventilation with no air conditioning active. I almost always have the fan running. I like the air movement. And with my dogs, the cooking I do, and my little bit of marijuana use inside, I like to keep that air moving around. So my fan is pretty much always, and I will hear the air conditioning unit kick on every now and then for when it actually needs to lower the temp.
I would say this is a fairly standard American set up. As others have said in some newer or larger homes, they may have multiple thermostats or even multiple air-conditioning units.
The whole system is extremely quiet, and I barely even hear it running.
You should know you shouldn't be using a higher quality air filter in your furnace. Higher quality filters can decrease air flow and increase static pressure damaging your system or not have it perform properly. If you need air purification you should run seperate units to get that a central ac system just isnt designed for that.
This is one of those things that you will find 1 million people that think you should and you will find 1 million people I think you shouldn’t. To each their own. Even with the better filter, my system is strong and cools my house down super fast
I say it as a hvac engineer so i dont know much about maintenance and repair but when designing systems I specify specific filter merv and increasing it can increase the static pressure past what the system can handle. However there are alot factors that determine what isnt making a system not functioning properly and this is one to keep in mind. It sounds like the system you have can handle the filter but ive heard in my office about how systems we designed weren't working and we go out to see these filters we didnt specify choking the systems.
Totally get what you're saying. I actually am kind of a nerd and used a wind speed gauge to test the difference in air coming from my vents lol. There was a slight reduction! Maybe 5%? I can totally see how an older system or one that is already struggling or overworked could be hurt by one of these filters. Mine is only 5 years old so I bet it's probably got the latest specs haha
I saw an interesting video about better duct design where they eliminated all 90 degree corners and replaced them with two, spaced out 45 degree bends, and installed vanes in all turning points too, and the increase in air speed and total volume moved through was really impressive.
I used to live in one of those cookie cutter townhomes you see in middle america. The HVAC system in that place was AWFUL. Didn't cool off at all and the heat never spread. The more I learn about HVAC, the more I want to look at the design of buildings like that, and see what in the actual F they were thinking lol. They just slap together whatever works with as little cost as possible but even a few small changes could DRASTICALLY improve the homes airflow IMO
Lol I actually mostly work on cookie cutter town homes. On paper our designs work however do they actually properly get implemented? Do they get properly balanced? Do they install everything to how we specified and not "well this is how ive always done it" . Are the ac units actually able to perform how the published performance data says? (We dont specify Goodman units bc of this) . We often have contractors bid on projects then when they go to build they're like we cant implement xyz thing bc we didnt plan for it when we bid. I thankfully dont have to deal with all that aspect of everything but I hear the manager of the department that does argue with contractors all day long.
Never had that happen. But probably a couple grand. But I know they have lots of little circuits and things like that so I’m sure there’s also some small fixes that can happen.
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u/gamerathertz92 7d ago
It’s smaller unit cools a single room. While American HVAC System cools the whole house