HVAC Maintenance Tips to Avoid Costly Repairs and Increase Lifespan

Making sure the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning of your home is functioning and maintained is important for a number of reasons. Not only does it protect you from the outside elements such as extreme heatwaves or cold freezes in the winter. Given you use your HVAC system of your home almost everyday, its under a lot of strain and will eventually break down without performing routine maintenance; which allows you to catch costly repairs before they happen. We’ve compiled a few different tips for troubleshooting, identifying, and repairing HVAC issues; as well as continued maintenance during your HVAC’s lifespan.

1. Regular Maintenance Lowers Utility Bills

One of the most readily apparent benefits of maintaining your HVAC system is the reduced cost of utility bills. With the use of proper insulation, as well as an HVAC unit which has been properly maintained and is operating efficiently will spend less money on the electricity, heating, and cooling costs for your home. Additionally, it saves you from having to need to make major repairs or complete replacements of your HVAC system in the event of catastrophic issues or failure.

2. Improves Overall Air Quality

Not only does maintaining your HVAC unit keep your home cozy and fresh, as well as keeping the bills low; but it can also improve the air quality of your home. Be sure to clean filters regularly, and to maintain or replace the coils in your unit as needed. Unmaintained HVAC’s can run into several problems, the main being that these units can be a rattrap for dirt, mold, and bacteria as well as other pathogens or contaminants in your air. This can not only ruin air quality and air flow from your HVAC, but could even run the risk of causing you to develop a respiratory problems or even worsen existing conditions like asthma and emphysema.

3. It increases your HVAC lifespan

Depending on the level and frequency of your HVAC maintenance, your unit will not only function better but last longer as well. Given the already high cost of purchasing and installing HVAC units, its important to keep things running correctly in order to avoid major breakdowns, and in turn, major costs for replacements. Regular maintenance increases the lifespan of your HVAC system; leading to better performance and less future problems.

4. Improving your HVAC Efficiency

Remember in the first tip when we mentioned that regular maintenance can help lower the cost of electricity used by your HVAC system? This is becomes dirty, unmaintained units can sometimes require upwards of twenty percent more energy to generate the same level of cooling or heating you’d get from a well maintained AC system. Not only does not maintaining your HVAC mean you’ll be paying more, but you won’t even be receiving the best experience possible from your product.

5. Keep Internals Safe by Cleaning Heat Pump

If your HVAC unit is an outside air conditioner or a heat pump, it’s likely to get dirty much faster than an indoor unit which means the system will struggle in order to maintain the same cooling or heating as before. It’s recommended to clean these on a monthly basis, but cleaning twice a month can also help make sure things run in great shape. No only does this keep your unit from using more energy, but it aids in clearing debris which can damage internal components necessary for running your HVAC unit.

6. Clean and Maintain Drain Lines

Drain lines are also an important factor in HVAC maintenance. The moisture which can accumulate inside of your air condition can often accumulate with things such as dirty and dust. This can cause your drain lines to become clogged, and eventually this can cause the formation of things such as algae or mold inside of the drain lines themselves. Not only does this seriously risk your machine breaking down altogether, it presents a very real risk of releasing these contaminants into the air; which can make you and your family sick. This is why cleaning your drain lines periodically is so important for HVAC maintenance. It’s also recommended to clean with a mixture of water and vinegar, which can aid in killing and removing mold from your unit.