I have only about 1000 sq ft of house to cool. I live in NY State. Very damp here, and in the summer, hot.
I'm willing to pay more for central AC/dehumidifier that's really quiet. What would be a good quiet model?
thanks Laura
One thats installed by a *competent*, licensed, insured, professionally trained, HVAC technician.
Central AC is a dehumidifier, if AC is oversized and short cycles you dont dehumidify in which case a stand alone unit is good. Quiet is an instalers job. You need a load calculation no guessing on size
Look into a "split system" A/C unit. There is probably one for your size of the house, and having half the guts of the thing outside keeps most of the noise out of your home.
-john-
What do you *think* central AC is???
I ->think he's talking about the sort which doesn't use ductwork.
The compressor is outside, the condenser/fan is inside, looking like a truncated conventional window AC unit, but these are usually intended to cool a single room, while the OP is talking about cooling a (small) house.
That's a ductless split...
Graven Water posted for all of us...
Didn't you ask this before? Contact Stumpy; he is up there and it will be soooo quiet because it will never run.
The split-sytem idea seems like a good one. I don't think ductless would work because my house has 2 floors and ductwork would be needed to circulate the air well. Maybe one can use the house heater fan for the AC and not have to get a separate fan?
I do want something that's a dehumidifier as well as AC, because often it's damp here and not hot - the other day it was 67 F and 72% humidity. So I need to be able to turn on a dehumidifying function separately from the AC.
No, I haven't asked this before. Looking on google I'd found some models of central AC advertised as quiet, about 65 dB (meaning dBA I guess). Those are probably for a larger house than mine, and maybe I could find a quieter one. It would be in my garage. The heater fan is in my garage, it is about 50 dBA and that's plenty loud, the garage is next to my living space. I suppose the compressor the main noise you get from an AC, the fan noise is not so bad.
thanks Laura
Or maybe you can have the whole AC outside, routing its cold air through the heater ductwork. If I had something 65 dBA outside, it should be pretty quiet indoors.
Laura
The noise level is for the outdoor unit. The split system would use your existing blower, so it wouldn't be any louder than having your furnace operating.
For allergies one is supposed to have humidity about 50%. Are there central ac/dehumidifier units that will do this? Looking around I see a lot of portable ac/dehumidifiers, but not central ones.
Laura
Every central AC (or mini split) will reduce the humidity. Passing air through a cold coil will condense some of the humidity out of the air.
What is the heat source in your house? If it's a hot air forced furnace, you're a candidate for central AC to be added. I know, I did this for six years, working for someone else. And several AC add ons for friends of mine.
I get the impression, reading around, that a central AC can't dehumidify without cooling, because the condenser, which is what would heat the air in a dehumidifier, is outside, being cooled by outside air.
It should be possible to expose the condenser to outside air or to the inside air, depending on whether you want just dehumidification, which would heat the air, or air conditioning. So I don't know why a central AC couldn't also be a dehumidifier. It would have to have a humidity sensor of course. For my purposes it'd have to be able to reduce the humidity to 50%.
Laura
A *competent* HVAC tech would have already explained all that to you, and would have built in humidity controls as a standard offering. Keep in mind that on most normal resi installations, if the system is designed, sized, and installed correctly, it will have no problem maintaining 75 degrees with
50% humidity.
I need to reduce the humidity for allergy reasons, not just for comfort. So it has to be at least 50% or below, maybe 40%, dust mites die with 40% humidity. And I need to be able to reduce the humidity when it's cool; yesterday it was 67F and 72% RH indoors :(
So I'm not sure if there are central AC units that can do this, to be energy efficient they would have to have an option to either direct inside air or outside air over the condenser. I could run a central AC with a very low temperature threshold and run the heater at the same time, but that would be wasteful.
I do have forced air gas heat, and it's good to know that the noisy part of an AC can be outside, and it can use the blower in my furnace.
I'm not sure though whether I have to have a separate whole-house dehumidifier also.
It would probably be too hot to have JUST a whole-house dehumidifier. It doesn't get horribly hot in here without AC or dehumidifier - I got the roof ventilated and that helped to cool things down. But it is humid here in the summer and if I were dehumidifying from 70% to
40% I suspect a whole house dehumidifier would be making the heat inside a lot worse.Laura
So on damp cool days - say it's 60F and humid - a regular central AC could be used in a mode where it both heats the house and dehumidifies?
Laura
That would be a ductwork nightmare. I've heard of systems that can run AC to get the humidity percentage, and then run the furnace as needed, to keep the temp from being too cold. That's wasteful, of course.
Get somebody who knows what they are doing to correct the refrigerant charge in your cooling system, and do the calculations to insure that the system is not oversized for your home. As far as the dust mites, mold and mildew control, and to promote a healthy home, read the stuff written by Lew Herriman on humidity control and mold avoidance.
A correctly sized, and installed cooling system will provide all the humidity control you need without having to run at rediculously low temps. The symptoms your discribing are telling me that you system is probably oversized and not charged correctly... probably grossly overcharged.
The new systems are so quiet that most folks refrigerators make more noise than their refrigerators do.
Not with a correctly sized and properly installed cooling system.
I am in rural south Mississippi, and humidity is a real, year round issue. Currently the ODT here is 90 with a heat index of 104
Yes if the system is sized and set up correctly with the right controls on it. For those temps tho, a heat pump would be better suited than a gas furnace.
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