Home Care Key: Laws Affecting Your A/C Are Changing

It’s summer. You have air conditioning in your home. Life is great! Then it breaks. You’ll do anything to be able to sleep comfortably again!

When the systems in our homes are working properly we rarely give them any thought. It’s also easy to let the maintenance slip your mind. Changing filters, cleaning gutters, turning off spigots in the fall — the tasks are endless.

One thing you should check in the coming months, is the age of your air conditioner condensing unit — that’s the part that’s outside your home. You should check it because R-22 freon, which is a refrigerant chemical, will be illegal to be manufactured and imported to the US after January 1, 2020. R-22 has been found to deplete the Earth’s ozone layer and they EPA has been phasing it out slowly since 2010.

If you have a unit that was manufactured prior to 2010, you should plan for R-22 to be more expensive if your system needs to be serviced in the future. You should also plan that at some point you’ll need to replace your system and that might be sooner rather than later. You should weigh the cost of future services to your system against the cost of a new system.

Need a referral to an HVAC expert? Contact me and I’ll be happy to connect you to one.