Maximize Your Home Comfort: Choosing the Right Air Conditioning System for Your Saskatoon Home

Picture it… you’re enjoying your beautiful home in Saskatoon. It’s sunny. You are perspiring so much that your shirt is see-through. Things aren’t as beautiful as you thought. 

There is a reprieve from these sometimes unforgiving Saskatchewan summers – air conditioning. 

How do you choose? There are only a couple of different types of A/C, and we’ll go over them in more detail for you below. 

Or, if you’re interested in exploring energy efficiency in more detail, you can learn about that here!

Forced Air Central Air Conditioning

You’re probably familiar with this one. 

A central forced air cooling system is installed in the supply air plenum (the ductwork above your furnace) of a forced air furnace or a fan coil. 

You might be surprised to learn that these systems utilize the indoor blower fan in the furnace to bring warm air from the living space to the cooling coil of the air conditioner. The refrigerant removes the heat in the air and discharges it outside at the condensing unit. Once the air passes through the cooling coil, it is sent through the supply air side of the duct system, where it is distributed throughout the space (This is why your friendly neighborhood Razor tech also looks at your furnace when doing an A/C maintenance). 

The same thermostat that controls the heating in your home also turns the air conditioner on and off as the temperature in the space rises and falls. This system is the most common as it is the most cost-effective method to cool a large space. You can control the temperature of different rooms to some extent by opening and closing the supply air registers to adjust the amount of conditioned air that is introduced to the room. It might not be perfect, but it’s still pretty good! 

Ductless Split Air Conditioners 

If you’re looking around your home and worrying that you can’t have A/C because you don’t have a duct system, fear not! A ductless split might be the answer. 

These units (as the name implies) don’t have a duct system, the indoor portion of the system mounts on a finished wall in the home and is connected to the outdoor condensing unit by copper lines to carry the refrigerant.  The indoor units are most commonly horizontal units that are mounted high on the wall near the ceiling and incorporate the cooling coil, blower and air filter.  On most systems, the temperature is controlled by a remote control like a TV remote, making it even easier to stay cool. The temperature is set on the remote and the system either samples the temperature of the return air entering the cooling coil or from the remote itself.  

Typically, these units are variable capacity, so they will speed up or slow down depending on the heat load in the space, which saves energy and reduces the noise emitted from both the indoor and outdoor units. The noise level of these systems is actually a little unbelievable. The indoor units can have ratings as low as 29 dB, and outdoor units around 50 dB. They incorporate a lot of advanced technology, which allows them to achieve ridiculous efficiency ratings while precisely maintaining the indoor temperature. 

The downfall may be that because these systems don’t have ductwork, they can’t distribute the conditioned air to different rooms very well from a single indoor head unit. To address this shortcoming, there are multi-zone condensing units which utilize one outdoor condensing unit that connects to several indoor units in different rooms in the home. This allows for individual temperature control in every area where a head is installed. Cool right? 

If high-wall indoor head units won’t work for you, there are different options available. These include ceiling-mounted, floor-mounted and even variable-speed air-handling units that are designed to connect to a duct system.  All of these different indoor units can be connected to the same outdoor unit, so you can customize your setup. You could have a high wall in one room, a floor mount in another and a ducted air handling system to supply a few rooms in a different area of the house, all connected to one outdoor unit and all able to maintain different temperature setpoints. 

Heat Pumps 

A “heat pump” is a bit of a misleading title.  All refrigerant-based “air conditioners” are “heat pumps,” really. They work by absorbing heat energy from one place and pumping it to another to be emitted. What we call an “air conditioner” picks up the heat from the air in your home as the air moves through the cooling coil and  “pumps” it to the outdoor unit, where it expels the heat to the outdoors.  A “heat pump” is the same process except that the heat is picked up outside and pumped inside to be expelled, so it adds heat to your home instead of removing it.  

Heat pumps can be part of the solution to help reduce carbon emissions because they can heat spaces using electricity instead of fossil fuels in the home. In some parts of the country, this works well because they are able to produce electricity from non-greenhouse gas-emitting sources like hydroelectric dams. In Saskatoon, however, we utilize natural gas to run the power plant for the most part, which kind of works against the heat pump theory.  

Here’s some science: 

Traditional heating methods, like burning natural gas in a home furnace, use about 98% of the heat energy from the gas. Burning natural gas at a power plant converts roughly 50% of the energy into electricity. This electricity loses some efficiency due to line losses, to power a heat pump.

Since a heat pump collects heat and moves it around instead of actually creating it, more heat can be supplied than is consumed in the process, making it more efficient. This efficiency is measured by the coefficient of performance (COP). A COP of 3, which is pretty much the maximum efficiency for current heat pumps, means that for every unit of energy consumed, three units of heat are delivered to the home. Therefore, one unit of natural gas energy burned at a power plant results in 0.5 units of electrical energy, which can power a heat pump to deliver 1.5 units of heat to the home. This makes heat pumps more environmentally friendly than gas furnaces under optimal conditions.

However, the efficiency of heat pumps decreases as the outdoor temperature drops. A best-case scenario COP of 3 is achievable when the outdoor temperature is around 15-20°C, which is not typically when homes need heating. As the temperature drops, the COP drops because there is less heat available in the air. If the COP falls below 2, it becomes more efficient to use natural gas directly in a home furnace rather than burning it at a power plant to generate electricity for a heat pump. 

The solution to this problem is Hybrid heating!  With this system your traditional air conditioner would be replaced with a heat pump and you retain your existing natural gas furnace to take over the heating requirements when it is cooler outside.  This way you are able to realize the benefits of the heat pump while still being able to heat your home in our cold Saskatchewan winters all while minimizing your carbon footprint.  What’s even better is that with a Moovair, Gree or Carrier inverter style heat pump system the compressor is able to vary its output just like a ductless split air conditioner so you also get the benefits of quieter operation and maximum efficiency in cooling mode as well as heating!

We’re here to answer your questions and guide you. We know Installing or replacing an air conditioning unit is a big investment, and we want to ensure you’re getting the right system for your home.

Get in touch with us online or give us a call for a no-obligation chat, so you can stay cool in the Saskatoon summers!