Your air conditioner is one of the most often-used and relied-upon appliances in your home. However, even though it runs for hours at a time each and every day throughout our state’s long warm-weather season, few people actually give their air conditioner the attention and care that it needs. Believe it or not, putting in just a little bit of extra effort to maintain your air conditioner can help it run more efficiently and work more reliably for much longer than it would otherwise.
Here are a few valuable and easy-to-follow air conditioner maintenance tips that can help it work better and improve its functionality.
Turn Off Heat Sources
The less you have to run your air conditioner during peak season, the longer it will last. If you want to keep your home cool, one of the easiest ways is to turn off sources of heat and leave them off, especially during the warmest parts of the day. These heat sources include things like your range or stovetop, your clothes dryer, your oven, and more.
However, there’s another heat source that few people think twice about: the sun. Nature’s largest source of light is also a huge source of heat that can pour through your windows and warm the air in your home, causing your air conditioner to have to run more. Keep blinds or windows shut during the hottest parts of the day, and try to switch over to low-heat lightbulbs, such as LED lighting, which are both efficient and won’t warm the air in your home nearly as much.
Change Your Filter
Your air filter is a small and inexpensive part that most people forget about, and yet it’s one of the most important parts in the entire system. Countless numbers of air conditioner problems can be traced back to a dirty air filter as the cause, including inefficiency, poor performance, and even catastrophic breakdowns. And yet almost nobody changes their air filter nearly as often as they should.
As a homeowner, you should be checking your air filter monthly and changing it whenever necessary, which can be as much as once a month in a high-use climate. This is especially true if you have pets, live near construction or in a particularly dusty area, or suffer from allergies or asthma, and need the extra protection of a constantly-clean filter.
Run Fans When Possible
Heat and humidity can make the hottest parts of the day difficult, but cooler nights can allow you to give your air conditioner a break by shutting it off and running fans instead. Opening your doors and windows and allowing the cooler air from outside to naturally keep your home comfortable uses a small fraction of the energy that your air conditioner does, and doesn’t contribute to its wear and tear. Therefore, letting small fans handle keeping you cool during the night can prolong the life of your air conditioner and help it function better when you need it most: during the warmest parts of the day.
Run Your Bathroom Fan
It may seem counter-intuitive to think you actually save energy by turning another device on, but that’s actually what a bathroom fan can do. Showering creates steam, and high humidity levels means that water vapor in the air has nowhere to go and instead just stays in your home, forcing your air conditioner to continue working harder.
Turning on your bathroom fan allows more ventilation to flow through your bathroom, helping exhaust the steam and water vapor outside and lightening the load on your air conditioner. Believe it or not, the heat and water vapor produced by just one 15-minute shower can force your air conditioner to run for an extra half-hour to compensate for the added heat and humidity, but running the fan can lighten that load considerably.
Get Regular Maintenance
Your air conditioner is kind of like your car: the better care you take of it, the longer it will last you and the better it will work. Also like your car, you should have your air conditioner regularly inspected and maintained by a qualified Orlando air conditioning expert. An annual maintenance service includes important steps such as coil cleaning, electrical inspection, motor lubrication, and much more, all of which can improve your system’s efficiency and keep your cooling bills lower.
For more information about our maintenance plans, call Del-Air Heating and Air Conditioning today by dialing 888-831-2665!
