There are many advantages to hydro-air heating systems that provide energy-efficient solutions to keep you warm, but what about the cooling? The great thing about these highly versatile and efficient HVAC systems is that they also offer simple solutions to add air conditioning to your home. The following hydro-air cooling information will help you add air conditioning to your system:

• Understanding how hydro-air HVAC systems work—These are heating systems that are designed to provide efficient and comfortable heating to your home using a hydronic heat exchange in an HVAC plenum. The system uses heat from a water heater or boiler, rather than from a conventional furnace. The hydro-air design is energy efficient and offers a solution to expand the system and add features like cooling to your home. These systems are ideal for more efficient heating and cooling for your home because they have simple designs that can easily be expanded to add modern air conditioning to newly finished spaces like basements or home additions.

• Updating the design of the air handler for cooling—If you are planning on adding air conditioning to the design of your system, the air handler is going to need to be updated. This is the plenum box where the thermal exchange process happens. When you are adding to cooling to the system, an extra cooling coil from an AC unit needs to be added to the air handler. Therefore, modifications may be needed to make room for the AC and heating coils to provide your home with efficient heating and cooling solutions. The air handler design of a hydro-air heating and cooling system is actually simpler than other designs because the same plenum can be used for both the heating and cooling of your home.

• Choosing the AC heat pump or condensing system—An AC heat pump is one of the options for your hydro-air system, which can also help provide thermal energy for heating when it is not used for cooling. The most common solution to add an AC compressor and conventional AC condensing unit, which can be a modern high-efficiency model. The AC compressor that is added to the system will provide cooling to the coil that is installed in the air handler to provide your AC with cooling when it is needed.

The addition of a cooling coil and AC compressor can complete your hydro-air system with cooling for the summer heat. Contact an air conditioning service and ask them about these solutions to add AC to your system before next summer.