How to Keep a Gas Furnace Safe

March 4th, 2015

Gas furnaces are the most popular way to provide heat for homes. They have incredibly high heating power (greater than almost any other type of heater) and are cost-effective because natural gas is less expensive than electricity.

However, some homeowners are wary about having a natural gas furnace installed because of the possibility of carbon monoxide leaks. It’s true that gas furnaces, as with any appliance that uses natural gas, can create hazardous and explosive fumes. However, the actual danger a modern gas furnace poses to a household is minimal and often exaggerated.

Nonetheless, it’s important that you takes steps to see that your home’s gas furnace remains safe. For professional assistance, you can call on the team at Kool Breeze. We work on all kinds of furnaces in Pensacola Beach, FL, and offer excellent maintenance and repair work whenever you require it.

Tips to keep your furnace operating safely

  • Regularly change the filter: The air filter in a furnace protects the interior of the heater from sustain damage and becoming dirty. To make sure the furnace suffers from as few issues as possible, you should replace/clean the filter every month during periods when the furnace runs on a regular basis.
  • Schedule annual maintenance: This is one of the most important steps to take for furnace safety. Each year, preferably in the fall, have a professional technician inspect and tune-up your furnace. The technician will find any repair issues or problems with safety mechanisms and have them taken care of before they can turn into problems.
  • Never try to repair the furnace on your own: It’s imperative that you do not tinker with the interior of the furnace cabinet. This is one of the ways that gas leaks can start. (In most jurisdictions, it is illegal to work on an appliance connected to a gas line unless you are a licensed professional.)
  • Always call for prompt repairs: If you notice anything amiss with the furnace’s performance, don’t wait to call for technicians to fix it. Delays can lead to a furnace that operates unsafely.
  • Put carbon monoxide detectors in your home: Although the risk of carbon monoxide poisoning is low, CO detectors will give you the peace of mind that there are no toxic gases in your home.

Kool Breeze offers a regular maintenance program for furnaces in Pensacola Beach, FL that will not only keep your furnace safe, it will also look after your air conditioning system. When you sign up, you’ll receive additional benefits such as a 10% discount on non-warranty parts and priority service. Call us today for more details.

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Is It Too Late to Schedule Heating Maintenance?

February 25th, 2015

Heating systems, no matter what type, should have a yearly maintenance inspection and tune-up in order to ensure that they will work at their most energy efficient and to reduce the effects of wear and tear from age that can lead to unnecessary repairs or an early replacement. The best time of the year to schedule maintenance for a heater is during the fall, a period when conditions are still warm and the heater is rarely necessary, but close enough to the seasonal change that you can feel confident that the system will go into the colder weather in the ideal condition.

To arrange for heating maintenance in Fort Walton Beach, FL that will see that your heater works at peak efficiency and with as few issues as possible, call Kool Breeze and ask about our regular maintenance program.

Because of Florida’s warm climate through much of the year, heating maintenance is something that is easy to let slip past. If you neglected to schedule heating maintenance for last fall, you might wonder if it is too late to schedule it now or if you should just wait until next fall to have the work done.

The answer to this is that it’s never too late for annual heating maintenance; it is far worse for your heating system to miss a yearly inspection and tune-up than for it to have it a few months late. Heating systems will lose efficiency each year they go without regular maintenance, with an average drop of 5%. Worse, you risk the system experiencing a large malfunction that could lead to a complete breakdown—or even the need to replace the entire system. Although Florida experiences short and mild winters, we still can have unexpectedly cold days strike through the spring, and you don’t want to get caught unprepared with a heating system that will stop working the next time you try to turn it on.

When you sign up for annual maintenance for your heater with Kool Breeze, you’ll receive other benefits as well. Our maintenance program includes a yearly tune-up for your air conditioner in the spring (very important to make it through the hot Florida summers) as well as a 10% discount on non-warranty parts and priority service that lets you skip to the front of the line whenever you call for repair work. Contact us today to find out more about our program for heating maintenance in Fort Walton Beach, FL.

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Common Heat Pump Issues

February 16th, 2015

Heat pumps have become very popular systems for good reasons: they are very energy efficient, they can both heat and cool your home and they have a long lifespan of 20-25 years. But even with all these positive attributes, a heat pump is still a mechanical device and it may need repair at some point. If you have a heat pump system for your home, here are some of the common problems that can develop with heat pumps:

Refrigerant Leaks

Heat pumps work by transferring heat from one location to another; they do this with the help of refrigerant. As such, your heat pump needs an exact amount of refrigerant in order to work properly. Refrigerant leaks can develop in a number of places; telltale signs of refrigerant leaks are low or no heat (or cooling) and/or icing on the coils. Only certified experts can handle refrigerant, and leaks can be tough to find, so any problems that develop with the refrigerant in your heat pump system should always be handled by an expert.

Problems with the Reversing Valve

The reason a heat pump can both heat and cool is because of a component called the reversing valve. This valve can the direction in which the refrigerant flows, allowing the heat pump to offer either heating or cooling for your home. Reversing valves are somewhat complex components; problems that can develop with reversing valves include refrigerant leaks, solenoid issues and getting stuck in a certain position.

Blower Issues

If you have a ducted heat pump system, your system has a blower that blows the cool or warm air into your home. Different kinds of problems can develop with blowers, including loose or broken fan belts, motor issues, electrical issues or problems with the blades.

It’s good for homeowners to know what some of the more common problems can be with a heat pump, but this doesn’t mean you should handle repairs on your own. Heat pumps are complex devices and should only be repaired by trained experts. Kool Breeze has been helping customers will their heating and cooling needs since 1986, so if you are experiencing any kind of issue with your heat pump in Navarre, call us today to schedule your next appointment with us.

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Some of the Unusual Movies Released for Valentine’s Day

February 14th, 2015

Hollywood has always tried to match movies up to the seasons to draw droves of viewers to the theaters: October is packed with fright-offerings, while the winter holidays skew toward warm and pleasing family films (as well as Oscar hopefuls). Valentine’s Day falls in an odd spot when it comes to the movie release calendar, however, since February tends to be a slower time for the film industry. The studios are as likely to slot strange movies that don’t fit anywhere else in their annual schedules into the Valentine’s Day weekend as they are films with powerful romantic appeal.

So, while the second weekend of February has featured hugely successful romantic comedies like Hitch, The Wedding Singer, and (of course) Valentine’s Day, some truly weird choices have debuted in this weekend as well. And a few have even gone on to tremendous success despite the bizarre match with the holiday. Here are a couple of the odder Valentine’s Day movie releases:

  • Dracula (1931): Yes, this Halloween perennial and the start of Universal Studio’s Classic Monsters actually came out on Valentine’s Day! But perhaps this makes some sense, as the Dracula legend has often received a “doomed lover” approach in the many years since Bela Lugosi made the aristocratic vampire a screen icon.
  • The Silence of the Lambs (1991): Does any film seem less appropriate for Valentine’s Day than this unnerving and sometimes very violent psychological thriller? What’s even more astonishing than the film’s release date is that The Silence of the Lambs eventually nabbed the Oscar for Best Picture, an almost unheard of occurrence for a movie released so early in the year.
  • Daredevil (2003): This Marvel comic adaptation featuring Ben Affleck as a blind superhero does contain a romantic subplot, but the stronger connection to Valentine’s Day may just be that Daredevil wears a bright red costume.
  • A Good Day to Die Hard (2013): The least successful of the Die Hard film franchise, this is an excellent example of a studio dropping a film into a weekend where it doesn’t fit in the hopes that it works as counter-programming. (It didn’t.)
  • Wayne’s World (1992): Now here is an example of counter-programming that clicked with audiences. This comedy based on a Saturday Night Live sketch turned into one of that year’s biggest hits and spawned a sequel.

Whether you celebrate Valentine’s Day with a trip to the movie theater, or you have your own special plans, everyone here at Kool Breeze hopes you and your loved ones have a wonderful weekend.

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What to Do if Your Furnace Won’t Provide Heat

February 5th, 2015

A furnace that won’t heat isn’t really of any use to you. As such, it behooves you to get it fixed as soon as possible. Now, you probably don’t have the tools or the expertise to actually repair your furnace yourself. However, there are a few steps you can go through before calling a professional technician. At the very least, you can eliminate some possible causes of the problem. Let’s take a look at what you can do if your furnace isn’t providing heat.

Check the Thermostat

The thermostat is the core of your heating system, responsible for actually deciding when your home receives heat and for how long. As such, a malfunctioning thermostat can disable the entire system, even if the furnace itself is perfectly healthy. Have a look at the thermostat and make sure that the settings and temperature are correct. If the temperature is obviously incorrect, or anything else is displaying strangely, then you may have a thermostat issue.

Listen

If your furnace is actually on, but not providing heat, listen for the sound of the furnace’s air handler. The air handler is the part that actually circulates air throughout the house, and you should be able to hear the fan blowing when the furnace is on. If not, then you have an issue with your air handler. It is possible that the motor is burned out, or that some other kind of electrical shortage has deprived the handler of power. Either way, you should shut your furnace down and call a professional if you don’t hear the fan blowing. Otherwise, heat can become trapped in the furnace and cause it to overheat.

Check the Ignition

Faulty ignition is a very common cause of furnace failure. In older furnaces, it’s easy to check if the ignition is working. Simply look for the pilot light burning underneath the furnace. If the light is out, then that’s probably the source of your problem. Newer furnaces are more difficult to assess, as they use electronic ignition systems with little or no visible signs of malfunction. Even so, you should try starting your furnace while watching the burners to see if they ignite. If not, then you probably have an ignition problem.

If your furnace isn’t providing heat, call Kool Breeze. We offer quality furnaces and professional furnace services throughout Pensacola Beach.

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A Few of the Advantages of Ductless Heating

January 30th, 2015

Ductless heaters have often been used in areas where any kind of centralized heating is either too expensive or not physically viable. They are favored by apartments and other smaller living areas because they do not rely on ducts, making them only able to heat the rooms in which they are installed. This may seem like a disadvantage when compared to the reach of central forced air systems. However, there are a number of reasons to prefer ductless heating, even in a larger living space. Let’s take a look at a few of the advantages of ductless heating.

Energy Efficiency

Centralized forced air heating systems are actually incredibly inefficient when it comes to transporting heat across the house. Ducts are extremely fragile systems, prone to leaks of all kinds from various causes. This causes a staggering amount of heat to be lost every time the heater turns on. The US Department of Energy has estimated that as much as 30% of a forced air system’s heat is lost to duct leaks every time it’s turned on.

Ductless heating systems don’t have to worry about any of this, because they deliver heat directly into the room. They are also not combustion based systems, which means they don’t have to burn any sort of fuel to create heat. Instead, they siphon thermal energy from the air outside and bring it into the room. This makes ductless heating systems quite a bit cheaper to operate than a lot of other systems.

Versatility

Centralized heating is also not very sensitive to the individual needs of a home’s occupants. Most of the time, a central heating system has two states: on and off. It does not account for varying temperature levels in various rooms, only for the immediate area around the thermostat. This “one size fits all” solution can lead to hot and cold spots throughout the house, as well as wasting energy on rooms that don’t need heating.

Ductless heating systems avoid this problem by only having one room to worry about. If you have a ductless heating system installed in each room, you have the option to not only set a different temperature for each but to only heat the rooms that are occupied at the moment. This saves you quite a bit of money.

If you’d like to know more, call Kool Breeze. We offer professional heating services in the Fort Walton Beach area.

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Warning Noises from Your Furnace: A Guide

January 23rd, 2015

Furnaces are notorious for making strange noises during operation, particularly after years of use. While not all of these sounds indicate a major issue, you should call a professional anytime you hear something unusual coming from your furnace. Let’s take a look at some of the more common warning noises that can come from your furnace, and what problems they can indicate.

Grinding

A grinding noise coming from your furnace indicates that the bearings in your air handler motor are wearing down. The air handler is the section of your furnace responsible for the circulation of warm air throughout your house. The air handler motor is what turns the fan and keeps the air circulating. Inside the motor is a group of bearings, designed to lubricate the motor and keep it running smoothly. Over time, however, the bearings can lose their lubrication. This actually increases the resistance on the motor, causing it to eventually overheat and burn out. If you hear grinding coming from your furnace, you should call a professional immediately before you have to replace the motor.

Squealing

Squealing coming from your furnace is also often located in your furnace’s air handler. The motor is connected to the fan by a rubber loop, called a “fan belt.” This belt is responsible for the transfer of motion that makes the air handler fan turn. Over time, the fan belt stretches and cracks, creating more friction between the various parts of the air handler. That is what creates the loud squealing noise that you can hear when your furnace starts. If not treated right away, the fan belt will break and render the air handler unable to operate.

Banging

A banging noise can actually have a couple of different causes. It could be your ducts expanding and contracting from the hot air running through them, which isn’t a big deal. It could also be due to part of your burner assembly firing late, due to carbon build up on the burner itself. That is a big deal, and needs to be treated. You’ll need to call a professional to confirm the source, one way or the other.

To schedule an appointment or if you’d like to know more about our heating repair options in Navarre, call Kool Breeze today.

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Heating Installation: Furnaces vs. Heat Pumps

January 14th, 2015

If you have a working set of ducts installed in your home, you generally have two choices available when it comes to heating installation in Pensacola Beach: a furnace or a heat pump. Most central heating systems in the U.S. are furnaces, consisting of a combustion chamber, a filter, a blower, and a venting system, and installed in a closed space like an attic or closet, or in a garage or basement. A heat pump is actually a heating and air conditioning system that contains an outdoor component and an indoor air handler, just like a traditional air conditioner.

Which system is best for your home? We’ll go over both heat pumps and air conditioners in today’s post, but be sure to contact a professional to determine which type, size, and model of unit is best suited for your heating needs.

Furnace

Furnaces are popular because of the generally low cost of installation as well as reliability. And if you’re skeptical of what a furnace can do for you because you’ve owned a poor-performing furnace in the past, then you may be missing out on an opportunity to get a new highly efficient updated model. Today’s furnaces are more efficient than ever, providing homeowners with a range of options to choose from including those with very high efficiency and performance ratings and advanced safety features.

Heat Pump

A heat pump uses refrigeration technology to move heat from one area to another, as the chemical blend can easily convert from a liquid to a gas and back again to absorb and dissipate heat. In the cooler weather heat is absorbed from the outside air to move indoors. This is cost-effective because it is more efficient for a system to move heat around than to generate heat.

It is often wise to get a heat pump if you need a new air conditioning and heating system. However, if you are only replacing an older furnace, a heat pump may not be your best bet. A heat pump replaces an air conditioning system, and it can come out to quite an expense if you replace a nearly new AC unit.

Call Kool Breeze for an honest assessment of your heating needs and to schedule new heating installation in Pensacola Beach.

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Heat Pumps vs. Furnaces: The Pros and Cons

January 7th, 2015

Heat pumps are quickly rising in prominence across the country, though they haven’t quite caught up to furnaces in terms of sheer numbers. With so many homeowners becoming aware of heat pumps for the first time, however, there are a lot of questions regarding which system would work best in which environment. Here, we’re going to try to answer some of those questions. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of both heat pumps and furnaces.

Heat Pumps

Heat pumps are a unique type of home heating system, in that they don’t rely on combustion to produce heat. Instead of burning fuel, heat pumps move heat from one place to the other. This is accomplished through the heat pump’s main components: the indoor unit and the outdoor unit.

When the heat is turned on, the outdoor unit evaporates refrigerant in a coil located inside its casing. The gaseous refrigerant draws thermal energy out of the surrounding air before carrying it down the refrigerant line to the indoor unit. The indoor unit then condenses the gas back into a liquid, releasing the thermal energy so that it can be used to heat the home.

Heat pumps are remarkably energy efficient, as they do not burn fuel to heat a home. They rely only on electricity and ambient thermal energy to operate. If you want to save money on heating bills, a heat pump is a good choice.

Unfortunately, the heat pump’s reliance on thermal energy in the air can also be problematic. In climates that frequently reach freezing temperatures, there often isn’t enough thermal energy for the heat pump to effectively heat the home.

Furnaces

Furnaces are combustion-based systems. That is, they burn some type of fuel in order to produce heat for distribution. They are widely popular across the country, mostly because they are relatively cheap and easy to repair or replace. Natural gas, which is the most popular furnace fuel type, produces a high amount of heat compared to the amount burned. This makes furnaces quite effective in heating a home.

Furnaces are not the most cost-efficient heating systems, however. The average furnace loses a lot of heat to things like duct leaks, and even natural gas furnaces cannot compete with things like heat pumps when it comes to energy efficient heating.

If you’d like to know more, call Kool Breeze. We offer professionally install furnaces in the Fort Walton Beach area.

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12 Grapes for 12 Months: An Unusual New Year’s Tradition

January 1st, 2015

Across the world, many cultures have specific traditions to celebrate the transition from the old year to the new. In the U.S. and Canada, we associate New Year’s with the ball in Times Square, kissing at the stroke of midnight, resolutions, and singing “Old Lang Syne.” But for many Spanish-speaking countries, one of the key traditions has to do with eating grapes as fast as possible.

The “twelve grapes” tradition comes from Spain, where it is called las doce uvas de la suerte (“The Twelve Lucky Grapes”). To ensure good luck for the next year, people eat one green grape for each of the upcoming twelve months. However, you cannot just eat the grapes during the first day of the new year any time you feel like it. You must eat the twelve grapes starting at the first stroke of midnight on Nochevieja (“Old Night,” New Year’s Eve) as one year changes to another. And you have to keep eating: with each toll of midnight, you must eat another grape, giving you about twelve seconds to consume all of them. If you can finish all dozen grapes—you can’t still be chewing on them!—before the last bell toll fades, you will have a luck-filled new year.

Where did this tradition come from? No one is certain, although it appears to be more than a century old. One story about the Twelve Lucky Grapes is that a large crop of grapes in 1909 in Alicante, Spain led to the growers seeking out a creative way to eliminate their surplus. But recent research through old newspapers shows that perhaps the tradition goes back almost thirty years earlier to the 1880s, where eating grapes was meant to mock the upper classes who were imitating the French tradition of dining on grapes and drinking champagne on New Year’s Eve.

It can be difficult to consume grapes this fast, and the lucky grapes of New Year’s Eve have seeds in them, making the job even trickier. (Seedless grapes are not common in Spain the way they are over here.) For people to manage eating all the grapes before the last stroke of midnight requires swallowing the seeds as well and only taking a single bite of each grape.

Oh, there is one more twist to the tradition: you have to be wearing red undergarments, and they have to be given to you as a gift. The origins of this part of the tradition are even more mysterious, and it’s anybody’s guess why this started.

Whether you go for the grape challenge or find another way to ring in New Year’s, all of us at Kool Breeze hope you have a great start to the year and a, uhm, fruitful 2015.

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