Funny thing happens a few hundred times a year over and over since the beginning of furnaces and air conditioners. You, the homeowner find a need to replace your heating or cooling equipment. So you make some inquiries with a few contractors and arrange an in home quotation. In the process you notice that from one quote to the next, not all the equipment is sized the same. How can that be you ask yourself? Surely there must be some kind of standardized rules that needs to be followed in sizing a furnace or AC unit for replacement? Shouldn’t the contractor you choose be following those rules?
The answer is yes! There are rules that we can and should use to size the equipment for your house. And they’re set out by our HVAC industry and the government to ensure that your home is properly heated, cooled and ventilated.
It’s done with a CSA load calculation method-CSA-F280. Unfortunately, too many contractors still use a “rule of thumb” method to “Guesstimate” the size of the equipment they’re going to offer you. And we all know that everbody’s thumbs are different. In reality, the standardized CSA-F280 method is there to prevent the oversizing and in some cases undersizing of equipment that has plagued our industry for years. Many municipalities, utilities, and even some of today’s government rebates require that a proper load calculation be done in order to quailify for a work permit or the processing of the grant paperwork.
A few years ago we decided as a company to do certified CSA-F280 load calculations on all of our residential installations. As we were the first and possibly the only company in the area to do this on such a large scale, our concern was that the extra time in the house measuring and sizing might irritate our potential customers and jeapordize the sale. The “Right Sizing” of equipment had to be a tremendous benefit to the consumer and we hoped it wouldn’t negatively impact the work we do in earning the sale. It was the right thing to do, so we did it!
We invested in Lap Top Computers, Portable Printers, CSA approved Software and weeks and months of training for our Home Comfort Team. We were able to take advantage of the computers to further automate the quotation process which was a great help to our “Comfort Consultants” and allowed us to present a fully detailed quotation based on load calculations at the homeowners kitchen table. No question about it, it’s a lot more work. But the bottom line is, you get the right sized product in your home. Our customers love it!
So, when you’re surfing the w.w.web or in the library, looking for information on how to select a contractor when buying HVAC equipment, you’ll see over and over again consumer advocates, government agencies, HVAC trade Associations recommending that you have a qualified contractor do a certified heat load calculation on your home.
The real bottom line is this . . . it’s your money, and putting in the wrong sized equipment can cost you a lot more of it, especially in the long run. And it’s all about comfort. Properly sized equipment means Comfort and Savings!