The Best AC Maintenance Tip For Homeowners This Summer: Keep it Clean
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We all know that AC care is self care during the summer months, and official summer is just around the corner. Before it gets really hot, and we all start impressing each other with our conversation skills (Is it hot enough for you?), and your social media feed is filled with pictures of people’s car thermometers, you may be asking yourself, “What can I do to take care of my home AC system?” We are here to help!
There are a few things you, as a homeowner, can do to maintain your AC system to ensure that it runs more efficiently this summer. The best AC maintenance tip of all this summer? Keep it clean.
AC Maintenance Tip #1: Clean Your Vents
If you’re not super familiar with your AC system, there are generally three types of vents in your house: supply, return, and exhaust. The large vent you see on the left is a return vent. Air goes into the return vents to the AC for cooling, then the cool air goes back out to the house through the supply vents. The exhaust vent is where the really, really tired air goes. (Kidding, but sort of true: stale air in your attic or other ventilation spaces exits your home through exhaust vents.)
On the right, you can see a close-up of this return vent. See all the dust and debris accumulated on the vent fins and inside the duct? You can unscrew the vent cover, clean and disinfect it, and use a duster to remove the dust and debris inside as far back as you can reach. This clears the path and keeps all that crap from reaching the filter, blocking the ducts, and/or getting in the air you’re breathing.
If you have rust on your vent covers, replace them with moisture-resistant resin covers.
AC Maintenance Tip #2: Change Your AC Drip Pan
The drip pan is there to catch the moisture that naturally occurs as a result of condensation that forms as your AC cools the air. If water is sitting in the pan long enough to rust, you might have a clogged condensate line. You can see the next section for help with that, or it might be one of a few other problems. When the pan gets this rusty, you need to replace it, which you can do yourself for around $200-600 depending on your unit, or you can call a professional. You should always check your warranty first to see if it’s covered.
Please DO NOT go find something in your kitchen to replace your AC drip pan in the meantime. Or do, but then don’t forget about it and leave it there forever.
AC Maintenance Tip #3: Clean Your Condensate Line
In case you’ve never seen a white blob like that before, and don’t immediately know what it is, that is what happens when you have a leak behind the drywall in your ceiling. Before it breaks and water goes everywhere. I wish whoever took this photo (it was me) had thought to put something next to the white blob for reference so you could tell how big it is. But if they had put a yardstick up there, you would be able to see that white blob is about as long as a yardstick.
Anyhoo, the primary condensate line takes the water that collects in the drain pan away to a plumbing trap in the house, usually a bathroom sink. (You most often find this in one of the secondary baths of the house. Do you have a bathroom sink where you hear a funny dripping sound even when no water is running? That’s the one.) When the line gets clogged, the water in the pan has nowhere to go. The pan fills up, and in my case, spilled into the attic, leaked through the attic decking into the ceiling below, and — shortly after this picture was taken unfortunately — all over the carpet.
You know that saying about the cobbler’s children having no shoes? Even home inspectors make mistakes. What we should have done at our house, is what you can do now. Drip some diluted bleach, vinegar, or Nuline AC line cleaner down the primary condensate line to keep it from getting clogged.
Sadly, we’ve only just begun to cover how dirty our air conditioning systems can get, so we’re going to give you some more tips for keeping them clean this summer in next week’s Upon Closer Inspection. These should keep you busy till then!
If you have general questions about your AC system, how it works, how long it will last, and how you can better maintain it, you can have a licensed home inspector do a seasonal home inspection anytime.
