Why Your AC Isn’t Effectively Cooling the 2nd Floor

If you live in a two-story house, you may encounter a common central air conditioning problem: the AC isn’t cooling the upstairs as well as the downstairs. Ideally, a central air conditioning system should provide even cooling around the house. But second stories present a tricky problem: heat rises and the upper floors have more heat for the AC to deal with.

This situation is often more complicated than just “heat rises.” There may be issues with your air conditioning system that are limiting it. If you want better cooling for the second floor of your house, a good strategy is to start with calling Peak Home Performance. We offer AC repair in Colorado Springs, CO that can fix problems like this, or we can replace an inadequate air conditioner with a better one. We can also find other solutions like zone controls and multiple thermostats.

Reasons the AC Isn’t Cooling the 2nd Floor Enough

We already mentioned the basic problem an air conditioner faces with the second floor, which is the rise of heat. There’s also the movement of heat through the roof, and we recommend you have strong attic insulation to slow this down. But there are many two-story homes that have even cooling. What specific problem is limiting your AC?

• Undersized system: An air conditioner must be accurately sized for a house so that it has the cooling capacity necessary to cool both the top and bottom floor. If you have an inexperienced or amateur team install your AC, it may simply be too small to provide enough cooling power for the second floor. You’ll need a new AC put in, and you can trust our technicians to correctly size it.
• Leaky or inadequate ducts: The AC blower must push cool air up vertical ducts to the second floor. If those ducts contain air leaks or they were not installed correctly to allow for the correct volume of air, the second floor won’t cool down enough. You may also have too few ducts reaching the second floor. We offer duct repair and replacement to solve these problems.
• Inadequate single-zone cooling: Single-zone cooling is when you have only one thermostat for the entire house and the AC sends cooled air to all the rooms at once when it comes on. This can present a serious challenge for a two-story house since the thermostat is only registering temperatures on the ground floor. A way to get around this is to create a multi-zone system with extra thermostats. We can retrofit a current AC for zone control, although we recommend a new HVAC installation with zone control as the best option.
• Dying AC: If your air conditioning system used to have no trouble cooling the upstairs to the comfort level you want, then it’s possible the reason it’s struggling now is because the AC is too old. When a central air conditioning system is more than 15 years old, or even 12, it will start to lose capacity as it declines. The hot upper floor may be warning you it’s time for a new system.

Peak Home Performance: Guaranteed Comfort and Affordability.

Find out how to get two free tune-ups a year and other benefits! Learn more.