Recently I got the following from a place I have (not for much longer) corporate housing unit in.
Dear 610 West,
Please do not use the A/C unit when the outside temperature is below 65 degrees as this will result in the condenser and coil freezing up, causing your unit not to properly work. Using your unit when it is below 65 degrees can result in costly repairs that void the manufacturer’s warranty and the financial responsibility will be the residents.
My first reaction was “What kind of North Korean knock-off did they buy?” The Carrier and York systems I have in various buildings back on the farm never have any such problems.
My second reaction was “Why can’t apartment HVAC systems be like car systems?” These things are on an outside wall with some kind of big thing flush with the outside. Not sticking out like you see in many hotels although that might be better.
If you drive a vehicle new or high end enough to have an “auto” setting for climate control, you simply set a temperature. It has sensors measuring inside and outside temperature. When the outside temp is closer to what you want the HVAC opens the outside damper and pulls air in. Once the inside temperature gets close to outside it closes the damper. (Not all the way closed if heat is on, unless the law about carbon monoxide or whatever has changed.)
Some of the hotels I’ve stayed in seem to do this. If it is raining outside you smell the rain.
What brought this on was spring in Minnesota. Well, it could be anywhere in the Midwest on north. It gets hot during the day and cold at night. When apartments don’t have opposing outside walls with windows that open, you cannot get a breeze unless a gale force wind is blowing directly at your window. There is no place for a gentle breeze to go when trying to pass through. As such, indoor temps with the windows open during the day were pushing 80 when it was just shy of 70 outside. Yes, the higher floors had higher temperatures. It was also going to rain after 8 p.m. Nobody wanted to have to get up and close a window after settling down in bed to watch a bit of television before going to sleep. We all closed our windows and turned the air on before going to bed.
Sometime after/during the rain the outside temperature dropped to 60 degrees. Thankfully my unit did not fail, but I guess a bunch of them did. My building is one of the newest buildings of this new complex. Supposedly they used these same units in the first two buildings over a year ago and did not learn anything then.
Thankfully I lease corporate housing month by month until I really know a place and how long my contract will last. What I know now is that I’m moving. What I also know is that HVAC systems for apartments, hotels and homes should all operate like the ones in our cars. When beneficial, pull outside air in (through a filter of course) and use it to supplement heating/cooling.
I wonder just how many compressor systems they can replace on these cheap HVAC units before they are more expensive than a good system would have been?
