Understanding Energy Ratings

If you’ve ever gone shopping around for new heating and air conditioning units, you would be familiar with the SEER and EER ratings that all products carry. For most people, these numbers often go unnoticed, but they can be a great help if you’re looking to become more energy-efficient and reduce your energy consumption.

Let’s take a close look at these ratings and what they mean to the average consumer.

SEER Rating

SEER stands for Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratio. For heating and air conditioning, this measures efficiency over a period of time, most often one cooling or heating season. It provides you with an overview of a unit’s efficiency and can be an ideal way to project energy usage over long-term periods.

EER Rating

Heating and air conditioning systems will also carry an EER rating, which stands for Energy Efficiency Ratio. This number gives you an idea of the efficiency of a unit during usage. One useful analogy is to think of it in terms of car speeds. The SEER would be the average speed you maintained to go from point A to point B, while the EER would be the actual speed you’re running in at any specific time.

A Comparison

When looking for the right heating and air conditioning equipment, it’s important to pay attention to these two ratings. While they can provide you with different ideas about your system’s performance and energy usage, they do share one useful characteristic and that is, the higher these numbers are, the better off you will be.

Unfortunately, higher efficiency often comes with an equally higher price tag. The ideal HVAC system should be able to balance these numbers so that you, the consumer, ends up being the winner.

Talk to Us About Your Energy Performance Goals

To give you an idea of what ratings you’re looking for in an appliance, you can research California’s minimum requirements for energy efficiency or give our team at Brody Pennell a call at (310) 836-0606. Ask us about energy-efficient options for your home in Los Angeles.