Before you buy, Seer Rating, homeowners biggest mistake

there's a big myth in the HVAC industry that revolves around higher sear rating for instance you might have heard that the higher the Seer rating on an AC system the more that you're going to save well that's not always the case hi this is Kenneth with Atlas AC and in this video we're going to be covering a topic of seer rating and how much it actually saves you at any point during this video if you find it to be helpful please hit the like button that's going to really help me out with the YouTube algorithms Seer stands for seasonal Energy Efficiency ratio and what sear is doing it is measuring the efficiency of the cooling capacity of an air conditioner and doesn't have much to do with your heater what this means is you're going to see the majority of your energy savings during the summer time and just to clarify what I mean by savings I'm actually looking at savings from an Roi standpoint Roi just stands for return on investment that means if you're going to pay extra money for something how long does it take for that money to come back to you there's two main questions that we get asked all the time and one being I got a high electric bill can I just change up my system and fix this problem the other one is is you have an existing system that's 15 years or older and it's on its way out and you have to do something any ways and each one of those questions has a different answer on expected savings here's a cool online Seer Energy savings calculator that anybody can use and the URL is Seer energy savings.com we're not affiliated with this company at all but it is a very useful tool that anybody can use to get a good idea and to set proper expectations on Energy savings you know and mind you this isn't going to be perfectly accurate but it's it's there to give you a good idea if you are interested in using this calculator for yourself there is a few settings that you want to look at you want to get the current air conditioner settings right the size of your current system and then then you get to play around with different sear ratings you're going to also want to enter in what states you're located in and the city as well let's say you just moved into a home and your electric bills are out of control and you're just looking for any way to get your your your electric bill down let's say your AC system is is only five years old and you go well maybe if I replace this system then it's going to lower my electric bill and yes it's going to lower your electric bill however it's not going to ever Roi and let me show you why let's say you have a 1500 square foot home and it needs a three ton AC system and let's say your electric bill is out of control and your system is less than 10 years old it would probably be a 13 Seer system but if we come over here and we we look at bumping it up just from a 13 Seer to a 14 Seer system your savings is less than 800 over the course of the lifetime of this new system and a three ton basic 14 Seer system is going to cost anywhere between 6500 and 8 500 and so you can see that that is never going to pay for itself so let's look at what it does whenever we bump it up to 16 seer so the savings does go up quite a bit you can see now it came up to two thousand dollars so that does help but again still never going to pay for itself let's go up to 18s here so 18 Seer you save another thousand dollars over the course of the life over the 16 seer however we're now looking at variable speed systems to do this and the price range in between a variable speed system is going to be ranging between ninety five hundred dollars and uh over ten thousand so that's never going to pay for itself and the whole reason I'm putting this out is because it's very normal in our industry for salesmen to try to convince homeowners that it's going to pay for itself in when in reality you just solve the numbers so if you're looking at replacing a newer AC system I would do it for reasons like it's not sized properly or if you're looking for a better quality system or let's say you're going solar and you're just wanting to use less solar panels let's shift gears for a second and look at the other scenario let's say you have an existing AC system and it's it's older and the repair bills are about to start stacking up and it's time to replace it then the question flips over to what Seer rating makes the most Financial sense so let's continue using a three ton system as our example now if it's an older system it's probably going to be a 12 Seer system and let's look at the jump from 12 series to 14. and as you can see by bumping it up two Seer ratings going from 12 Seer to 14 Seer you're going to save close to 1700 over the lifetime of the system so what does it look like if you end up bumping it up to a 16 Seer system so let's check it out so you can see the savings jumps up to almost three thousand dollars and in between these two numbers the exact number on the Delta meaning the increased savings that you're going to get from a 16 Seer system is one thousand two hundred and seventy one dollars over the lifetime of the system so you're gonna generate one thousand two hundred and seventy one dollars more in savings than a than a 14 Seer system so the question from there is does that make sense to go ahead and go with the 16 Seer system well in our pricing the price difference is only a couple hundred dollars more for a 16 Seer system so heck yeah that's going to pay for itself along with that you're going to get a rebate so it that 100 makes sense to step it up to a 16 Seer system so as a quick disclaimer I have been talking about single stage systems so if we look at let's say a two-speed 16 Seer system would that financially make sense well a two-speed 16 Seer system is going to cost roughly two thousand dollars more than what a single stage 16 Seer system is so we're still going to end up dealing with the same Delta in between the 14 and the 16 Seer which is one thousand two hundred seventy one dollars however you're looking at two thousand dollars more in costs now if we add a rebate in there then you're still going to end up being upside down 429 dollars if you upgrade to a two-speed system now that being said we also sell more two-speed systems than any other system more than single speed systems and the high-end variable speed systems and to find out why customers are buying two-speed systems more than single speed you can watch the next video that helps explain the difference in between single speed two speed and the high-end variable speed systems now lastly let's talk about high-end variable speed systems and we can start off with a 18 Seer variable speed so there's a nice little jump going from a 14 Seer to an 18 Seer and that comes out to being 2259 additional in savings over A14 Seer system so the rule of thumb you're pretty much going to be paying double what a 14 Seer system cost so under no circumstances will it ever pay for itself so I would not buy a variable speed system with the expectations of me getting my money back through Energy savings however I would consider buying it for other reasons and other features that these systems have there is a reason that they cost so much more so there you have it the additional cost that's going to be incurred in going up in sear ratings balancing that out with the Energy savings that you're going to get so jumping up from a 14 Seer system to a 16 Seer single speed system is pretty much always going to make uh sense because you know that jump it doesn't cost a lot more however you still see the the benefit of the Energy savings and also most people will be eligible for rebates as well so that system definitely makes sense to jump up then you got the two speed systems which is right there on the line it's not going to quite pay for itself over the course of its life but it's still a great system and worth considering and then you've got the high-end variable speed system which it's just not going to pay for itself through Energy savings so you would consider purchasing that one for different reasons now the savings that we did review through this video is very conservative and the reason why I like going the conservative route is I don't like setting up false expectations for our customers we have had instances where we have replaced systems for some of our customers and they've reported back to us with Savings of three hundred dollars a month in reduction to their electric bills and they even showed us the electric bills proving that it did go down 300 a month which in no scenario that that I just showed you would do that and there are all sorts of reasons why they were saving that much money however it's just not that common so that's why we don't really promote stories like that if you found this video to be helpful please hit the like button and that will help us grow on YouTube also you might be interested in our next video that covers the the topic of multi-speed AC systems until next time have a good one

Channel: Atlas AC

Views: 78,904

Keywords: seer rating, hvac seer, seer rating heat pump, what seer rating do i need, hvac seer explained, 20 seer hvac, 14 seer hvac, seer rating explained, hvac seer rating explained, seer ratings for ac, hvac efficiency, what is seer, seer rating ac, seer rating for ac, high efficiency air conditioner, what is seer in hvac

Id: iYQ1YL4m5hQ

Length: 10min 4sec (604 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 08 2022