Owning a home entails certain responsibilities that you have to take care of yourself, and your central air conditioner maintenance is one of those responsibilities. I know this may sound frightening, but it’s really easy and should take no more than an hour of your time.
You will be doing simple maintenance on your home ac unit, not repairing it, so rest easy. In order for it to remain in good working condition, you should do this type of maintenance at least two or three times a year.
Ideally it should be done at the beginning or end of each season, but since I live in Florida, and we have only two season, I always do maintenance on my ac unit at the end of summer and the beginning of spring.
There are two locations you need to focus your maintenance on, and that is the outside condenser/compressor and the inside evaporator. The condenser is the unit that sits outside next to your home, and the evaporator will be located inside, maybe in the garage or the basement.
Before starting your maintenance, make sure your air conditioner is turned off, or the power switch is turned off. Either way, you don’t want the unit on while you’re in the process of cleaning it.
Air Conditioner Maintenance Outside
1. The first thing you want to do is check your condenser coils that lead from the condenser to the evaporator. Just make sure they are clean and free of dirt.
2. Next you want to check the condenser itself. This can have leaves, dirt, algae, and grass clippings sticking to the fins. You want to make sure and clean all of this so your unit can breath properly. You should use an air conditioning cleaner for this, but it you don’t have any, just use a water hose with a spray nozzle to clean all the debris off.
3. Give your compressor a good look, and see if it’s leaking oil or other fluids.
4. Clean around your compressor. Get rid of any grass or shrubbery that make be interfering with the air flow.
5. Check and see if your air conditioning unit has ports where oil would go. If they do, just add about 4 or 5 drops of oil. If your unit doesn’t have these ports, then don’t worry about it. Depending on the age of your unit, you may not have oil ports.
Air Conditioner Maintenance Inside
1. Starting on the inside of your home, the first thing you should change is your filter. It should be changed every month. Even if you have the most expensive allergen, dust mite, and dust catching filter… it still needs to be changed every month. And while you’re changing the filter, why not clean the slats of the vent.
2. The next thing you can do for your ac unit is to check the evaporator coils, if you have access to them. You need to make sure they are not rusted, dirty or dusty. Simply vacuuming away the dust with one of your attachments will do.
3. Check the condensation tube that collects the water that condenses on the coils. Make sure the water it collects is flowing smoothly and isn’t blocked by dirt or algae. This tube leads to the outside of your house where it deposits all this water. If you look at the opening of this tube, you can tell if algae if blocking the flow of water or not.
If it is, you need to get a wet/dry vacuum and suck all the algae out of the line so this water can flow. If you don’t, the water from the coils will either drip into your house or the bottom of the evaporator. It depends on if the vent inside your home is on the ceiling or the wall.
To keep this condensation collecting inside the tube flowing smoothly and free of algae, just add a few teaspoons of bleach to keep the algae away. The end of your condensation tube may be sealed, but mine is open and was pointing up.
I had to put a “U” shaped piece of tubing pointing down on the end so it could drain. Before that, it would clog with algae and I ended up with 1 foot of water at the bottom of the well, which is under the evaporator coils.
As you can see, central air conditioner maintenance is simple and easy. It’s not very time consuming and can be completed in one or two hours at the most. Try to do your air conditioner maintenance at least 3 times a year and you will extend the life of your unit.
When your ac unit needs more than just maintenance, then find yourself a reliable technician who you can develop a solid relationship with. I would recommend an individual owner, who doesn’t have the overhead that larger companies have.
I suggest this because when I experienced the water back-up in the condensation tube, I was told by one company that they would have to check the evaporator coils and clean them and it would cost about $600 dollars.
I called an air conditioning technician that owned his own business and worked from home. He had no overhead and no reason to charge me a ridiculous price. He explained what was happening, and showed me how to do maintenance on my air conditioner so I would not run into this problem again.
He vacuumed and cleaned the evaporator coils, cleaned out the evaporator tube, checked and cleaned the condenser, added more freon, cleaned around the condenser and charged me $75 dollars. Enough said.
