Time Allotments For A Brand-New Residential Air Conditioning Installation

When you are getting a brand-new central air conditioner installed for the first time, you should allow more time for this type of air conditioning installation than for a replacement. There is a lot more going on than just electrical wiring.  If you are wondering if you should take a day off from work for this, here are the typical time allotments for each step of the installation process.

Level Surface for the Condenser Box

The first step is to find an appropriate location for the condenser box. This has to be a patch of ground that is fairly level. It also has to be in close approximation to where the furnace is located in your home. The forced air and ventilation shafts of the furnace are "borrowed" by the air conditioner to help circulate the cold air through your home. Once the appropriate spot is found, and you agree to it, the contractor either throws down a prefabricated concrete slab or creates and pours slab. All told, this will require between twenty minutes to two hours, depending on the level surface found and/or created for the condenser box.

Drilling Holes and Running Wires

Next, the contractor has to drill holes into the side of your house closest to where the condenser box is. Here, the wiring that comes next will go one of two places. It will either run through the holes and into the house or connect to an air conditioning fuse box. (Air conditioning fuse boxes have their own fuses to help supply additional power to the A/C, otherwise your A/C would short out the fuse box to the rest of the house.) 

All the wiring that runs into the house goes to either the fuse box in the house, or the thermostat, which controls when the A/C runs and how cool you want the air to be. This will take at least an hour. The wiring that runs to the A/C  fuse box outside and the installation of that fuse box will take about another hour. Count on about two hours for the electrical wiring alone, although it can be less. If the contractor runs into some unusual electrical problems,  it may take longer than two hours, but that is rare. 

Installing the Indoor Components of the Air Conditioner

Homeowners are often surprised to learn that the whole of their air conditioners is not inside the box outside. There are indoor components, too. These parts are installed and wired into your home's HVAC system. This takes  somewhere between thirty minutes to another hour. All told, you can expect at least four hours of a regular workday to be consumed by an installation. You may just want to take a sick day

Contact a company, like Comfort Solutions Inc, for more help.


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