The High Operating Costs of an old Air Conditioner

Well, summer is here and the temperature isn't the only thing that's going up. Especially if you have an air conditioner that is older than 12 years, your power bill is on the rise too!

Ever wonder about those SEER ratings and how they can affect your power bill? I have a lot of my customers that have asked me what SEER stands for and how important it is to their decision making process, and that is a discussion for another day, but for now let's take a real life example of how this affects your pocketbook.

Let's suppose you have an air conditioner that is 12 years old. At that age it is not uncommon to have a SEER rating of about 6. Taking that for a base for our example let's do some math. If your system is 3 Tons that equals 36,000 BTU of cooling for your home. Simply divide that number by your current SEER, which is 6, and we come up with 6000 watts per hour to run your AC. That equates to 6 kilowatts per hour.

Now, let's take an arbitrary cost per kilowatt hour (kwh) at $.12 per hour and multiply by 6. That equals $.72 cents per hour to run your AC. Now if you ran it 10 hours per day for 20 days, that would equal $172.80 to run your system that month. You can see how running it more would affect your power bill.

Now, let's substitute 14.5 SEER for this example, which would reflect the purchase of a new, efficient system. Doing the same math as our example above, I come up with $.30 per hour to operate with a monthly bill of $71.51. Quite a savings.

So it's easy to see that changing out your equipment with a newer, efficient one will really cut those operating costs.

If you have more questions or would like me to calculate your savings based on switching to a newer Air Conditioner, just contact me, James, at Bonney Plumbing, Heating and Air at 916-444-0441 and we can chat over the phone or schedule a time for us to get together at your convenience.

Hope this helps, and have a cool summer!