You’ve probably heard the expression “blowing hot air”; it means that someone is talking a lot, but what they’re saying doesn’t have any substance. The metaphor essentially means what they’re saying is useless; when an air conditioner is blowing hot air, it’s not just metaphorically useless. In fact, an air conditioner blowing hot air is actually making things hotter in your home in the summertime; fortunately, most of the time, a unit that’s blowing hot air is having a problem you can fix yourself.
Check Your Thermostat
The most obvious solution is obvious because it’s often right. You’ve probably already checked the thermostat, but if you haven’t, make sure it’s actually on. Thermostats are often battery powered, so if there’s nothing on the display, change the battery. Make sure the temperature is set as low as you want it. Check to see if it’s on “Auto” or “On”; when it’s on auto, the fan blows automatically, whether or not the AC is running and the house needs cooling. These fixes will cover most cases of hot air blowing.
Maintenance
Air conditioners get dirty, just like anything else; when they do, it can cause problems with the compressor, which leads to less cool air being distributed to your home. You should change your filters, and clean off your air conditioner’s coils; if you don’t feel comfortable doing that yourself, you can schedule regular air conditioning maintenance with an air conditioning and Winnipeg furnace maintenance.
Power Problems
Long time readers of the blog will have a good idea how air conditioning systems work; heat is captured inside the home and brought to the unit outside the home, where it is released. When the unit outside isn’t getting power, the fans inside the home simply redistribute the hot air over and over again – not conditioning the air very much at all. More often than not, the indoor and outdoor portions of your AC system will be on different circuits, which means one may be getting power while the other isn’t. Check your circuit breaker, and make sure the external unit is getting power. You may need to flip the breaker; if it flips off again immediately, there’s probably a problem with the outdoor unit.
Other Problems
Those of you who’ve checked all of the above but are still experiencing problems have a situation on your hands that is, in all likeliness, not something you can resolve yourself. You should call a professional AC repair contractor to take a look at your AC and make sure everything is working properly; mechanical breakdown in the exterior unit, for example, can cause hot air to come out when the AC is on. It’s a good idea to do regular maintenance calls for your unit, to make sure things don’t go awry in the dog days of summer.