Maintaining your HVAC
Well… it’s NOT glamorous, it’s mostly hidden behind the scenes but it makes the house run and when it breaks down, homeowners notice immediately. HVAC (that stands for heating, ventilation and air conditioning) is an important component of YOUR home. In the dripping, blisteringly hot summers in the midwest, it keeps us cool and happy. It also helps circulate the air around the home, keeping things fresh in your living spaces.
Here are some things to keep an eye on to ensure your HVAC is performing at its best and ready for summer or winter.
Inspect and change filters
Inspecting and changing your HVAC filters is easy, and it’s one of the few jobs you can perform yourself when it comes to HVAC in your home. Any kind of HVAC system will have a filter of some sort. While these do help with the air quality in your home, they primarily protect your furnace from larger particulate matter.
Changing out filters in your home’s HVAC should be on the calendar as a regular occurrence. This is even more important if your home has certain living characteristics. For example, if you have two St. Bernards and a Himilayan cat, then you’ll need to replace the filters more often (and thank you goodness you’re not breathing all of that!). If you’re a neat freak, have all wooden floors and remove your shoes every time you enter, then you can probably go a few months without a filter replacement.
Tune it up!
If your HVAC system isn’t performing properly, it’s time to call a technician. A technician can pinpoint problems with a checklist, including items like pressure, fittings and refrigerant levels. Your furnace just sits there and generates a ton of heat, dust, etc. These things kill electronics and working parts over time. The only way to check all of those systems is to have somebody with the right equipment come out and test it.
When preparing your home for winter, you should think about the problems you may have experienced with your home last winter. Think hard or even make a list. It’s possible that you suffered from allergy problems or went to pay your doctor a more regular visit than you’d care for. Maybe you had a room that was cold. How about the roof; missing a few shingles?
Getting your home ready for winter requires you to pinpoint exactly what you saw and how you felt inside and outside the space to ensure those pain points don’t happen again. Even worse, having them become larger issues this year and costing much more financially than they need to.
The fall time of year is the right time to evaluate your home and insulate yourself from bigger winter problems. Some natural occurrences you can’t prepare for but you can be proactive with home improvements and have a professional do a winter home audit to ensure your family’s health and your home are in order.
Dust all the time
Though filters do a great job of catching the biggest particles of dust, it can still be a problem if it builds up. A primary problem spot for this is the blower. Dust will find its way no matter what you do. It’s simple to fix for most technicians. They typically use a vacuum with bristly ends.
Keep refrigerant lines clear
When refrigerant lines leak, your HVAC can suffer. There’s a lot of movement happening in your lines and fittings — it’s basically the “blood” of your heating and cooling system — so you want to ensure those lines are in tip-top shape. It should be on any technician’s checklist.
Clean your coils
Whether it’s an electric heating system, an air conditioner or a ductless mini-split, all HVAC systems have coils. Both hot and cold refrigerant flows through these coils, and the HVAC system blows air over them, delivering warm or cool air to your home. As air blows over these coils, tiny bits of particulate matter may stick to their exterior, and this can be a real problem. You notice this every winter season when you turn on the heat for the first time. The questions everyone asks is “what is that smell???”
You should have your HVAC coils cleaned routinely. When you don’t, dust can gather — or worse, if the dust meets condensation on the coils it can turn to int mold and blow around the house.
Lastly, fans and vents
Chances are you have vents and fans in your bathrooms and kitchen. Though not necessarily hooked up to your main HVAC system, they still need maintenance. Dust can collect inside the bearing units of bathroom vents, or between the fan and the casing, causing the fan to heat up and slow down. To solve this, periodically pull off the front cover of your fans and vacuum out any accumulated dust.
For kitchens, the key is keeping ventilation clean, and running your fan consistently when you cook. A lot of particles come off of food when you are cooking, and that can change the indoor air quality very quickly. If you’re not currently using cooking or kitchen fan and exhaust units… you should be.