Home Maintenance: How The 4 Major Home Systems Work Together

Want to ensure your home is always a comfortable, safe, efficient place to live? Pay attention to how the four major home systems work together … and schedule home maintenance to ensure they are always working at their best. 

The four major home systems include:

Cooling

Your home’s cooling system works by using a refrigerant to collect the hot air inside your home, cool it down, and return it to your home, giving you a comfortable place to live. Inside your air conditioner is a compressor, a condenser coil, and an evaporator coil. These three parts work together to quickly convert refrigerant from a gas to a liquid and back again. The compressor moves refrigerant to the condenser coil, where it changes to a liquid. The liquid moves through a pipe and enters the evaporator coil. This is where the liquid evaporates and cools down the indoor air. A fan blows indoor air across this cooled evaporator coil, where the heat from inside the home is absorbed back into the refrigerant. The cooled air is circulated throughout the home, while the warm air is moved back outside to the compressor, where it is released back outside. 

Heating

Throughout the Front Range, most homeowners use a gas furnace to heat their homes. A pipe from outside connects natural gas to the furnace. The gas flows into the furnace, where a burner lights it. Cold air from your home enters the furnace, where the burning gas supply warms it through a heat exchanger. The warmed air is directed into the various rooms of your home via the ducts and registers, controlled by the thermostat. Exhaust from the combustion process is piped out through a vent, and exits the home via an exhaust pipe. The thermostat is the hub of the heating and cooling process, which controls how often both the heating and cooling systems operate based on the temperature desired by the homeowner. 

Electrical

At its most basic level, your home’s electrical system takes electricity from the utility company and distributes electricity throughout your home. You have a meter that monitors how much electricity you use, and circuit breakers to ensure the right amount of electricity flows from the utility company into the various circuits of your home. If there is a problem with the wiring, there will be an interruption in the flow, keeping you and your house safe throughout the process. 

Plumbing

The plumbing system is a combination of two systems: one that brings freshwater in, and another that takes wastewater out. The first part allows water to enter your home and travel through a series of pipes to ensure water reaches every location. It’s further divided into a hot and cold system, where water flows through a water heater and is distributed via the hot water outlets throughout the house. The drainage system consists of vents, traps, and cleanouts built to pull wastewater out into the public sewer lines or septic tank for waste removal from your home. 

If any one system isn’t working at its best, it may disrupt your entire home. When was the last time you scheduled a home maintenance visit to ensure the four systems inside your home are working at their best?