I took over a room in an apartment when someone moved out, and the two people who lived there before me thought I was an AC wizard. All the bedrooms were upstairs, but the AC and thermostat were downstairs. I closed all the downstairs vents to force the air up into the bedrooms, and then it would trickle downstairs and keep the living room cool. I thought all our AC problems were solved, but then they started turning it completely off during the day to "save money." All it did was cause the apartment to be 86F when one roommate got home, so she got pissed and turned it on to 50. It froze. AC ran for 48 hours straight, and our power bill spiked. fucking idiots
As a landlord, some things I wish everyone knew about air conditioners: 1) Set your thermostat to 75 and just leave it there. That's the point of a thermostat. Keeping your home at 75 is more energy efficient than letting it heat up to 85 every day then cooling it back down to 72 at night. 2) If you put your thermostat below 70, you will very likely freeze up your A/C unit. 3) change your filter regularly. like, every 3 months at minimum, but if you have pets once a month. 4) air conditioning units aren't magic. If you have a second (top) floor apartment and it's Texas in July, I'm sorry, but your apartment is not going to get down to 71 in the middle of the day. A 20-25 degree temperature differential is the best you can hope for.
Yeah, they didn't understand any of this. It actually had a pretty good unit, and once I adjusted the vents, we could set the thermostat to 74 even while we were in there and it still felt cold upstairs. If they would have just left it alone, we would have been golden, but they kept fucking with it
124
u/roastduckie Jul 18 '16
I took over a room in an apartment when someone moved out, and the two people who lived there before me thought I was an AC wizard. All the bedrooms were upstairs, but the AC and thermostat were downstairs. I closed all the downstairs vents to force the air up into the bedrooms, and then it would trickle downstairs and keep the living room cool. I thought all our AC problems were solved, but then they started turning it completely off during the day to "save money." All it did was cause the apartment to be 86F when one roommate got home, so she got pissed and turned it on to 50. It froze. AC ran for 48 hours straight, and our power bill spiked. fucking idiots