Balance Your AC & Heating in Your New Luxury Home

One of the things I have really appreciated about our builder has been all of the great tips that they have shared about making our home more liveable, after we moved in. Most builders are long gone--ours has been terrific. One of the most important tips they gave us was to balance our AC and heating, after we put our window treatments in place. I've owned several new homes, but never has the builder made this suggestion before. Our house had a minor glitch (BTW, all houses when they are new have things that don't work right initially. Buying a brand new house usually has more problems attached to it than many resales.) In our house, the AC folks had inadvertently hooked up the unit that runs the downstairs AC to the upstairs thermostat. We couldn't figure out why we couldn't get the downstairs to cool down. I finally went upstairs and reset the thermostat and it worked downstairs. The builder immediately took care of the issue.

It's important to have your AC and heating balanced (i.e. this means you have two systems) after you install your window treatments. When your house is new, you normally have to wait several weeks or months before you your window treatments arrive since most people order them separately from the builder. (Builders normally add an additional charge for this because what ever they install they have to warrant. It generally makes more sense to hire your own decorator to handle these items.) When the sun comes in through an unprotected window, it will increase the room temperature quite dramatically. Unprotected windows also will cause the room to cool down more in the winter time. Once you have your window treatments installed, have the company who installed your system out to balance it, so that each room is the receiving the appropriate amount of heating and air conditioning.

BTW, don't forget to have the other systems checked as well. In our last house, they hooked up the hot water to the toilet in one of the guest bedrooms--Not exactly the warm greeting your guests would be expecting.

Posted by Bernice Ross, www.RealEstateCoach.com