🚀 go-pugleaf

Greetings!  I'm needing the help of this group in regard to an Air
Conditioning question.  Let me describe the house and then the behavior and
then I'll pose the question "Is this Normal/Right?"

Thanks very much.

HOUSE DESCRIPTION

The house has 5 windows on the west side and 3 windows (two VERY wide)
windows on the East Side.  The master bedroom is on the west side and the
other rooms are on the east side.  Consequently, the west side is naturally
pretty cool until late morning, but the east side gets warm pretty quickly.

After noon, of course, the west side starts to heat up.  We have shades on
two of the five windows on the west side, and are ordering shades for the
other windows. There are curtains and sheers on all the windows.

The thermostat is in a hallway on the east side of the house.


BEHAVIOR

I have a programmable thermostat.  The highest setting it will let me
select for the A/C setting is 88.  At night, I have it set to the highest
setting.  On Saturdays (or vacation days) when we sleep in, we tend to 
bypass starting the cooling early in the morning (we let the temperature
setting remain at the 88 degree setting.  Last Saturday, it was quite
comfortable on the west side, but when we checked the thermostat, it said
that the current temperature was 88.  Therefore, we turned on the 
A/C.  This was about 11:30am or so.

The A/C ran continuously until about 5:30 -- for the entire afternoon, it
never cooled the house down below 84 degrees.  After 5:30 or so, it was
cooler outside, so I assume it could finally get down to the lower setting.

The next time, wanting to avoid this, I started the A/C earlier and it
APPEARED to maintain the correct temperature.

The next couple of times, I neglected to do this and I witnessed a repeat
of the problem that the A/C didn't seem to be able to cool off very much.


QUESTION

Is this proper behavior?  I've asked some people I know and received the
following answers:

	- YES; it's much easier to maintain a temperature than to bring it
	  down.  In any event, A/Cs cannot cool much more than 20 degrees
	  below the ambient air temperature.

	- NO; the air conditioner might be low on freon or something like
	  that;  It should not be running for 5+ hours with such poor
	  performance; call an A/C man immediately.


Well, gentle readers; therein lies the problem -- what do YOU think?

Thanks again!

Richard W Losey       rlosey@metronet.com  


PS> Since the house is <1 year old, it shouldn't cost me anything to
    call the people who installed it.  The first compressor was dead
    when we first moved in.  I do intend to talk to them about this,
    but would appreciate the feedback from the people here.

PPS> We are having a Texas summer -- it's been right around the 100 degree
     mark for several days now.