Owning a home entails certain responsibilities that you need to take care of, and maintaining central air conditioning is one of those responsibilities. I know this sounds meticulous, but it’s easy and won’t take more than an hour of your time.
You will be doing simple maintenance on your home and unit, not repairing it, so you can rest easy. In order to remain in good working conditions, you should do this type of maintenance at least twice. for a year
Ideally it should be done at the beginning or end of each season, but since I live in Florida, and we only have two seasons, I always do my maintenance and unit at the end of summer and the beginning of spring.
There are two places you should focus your maintenance on, the outside of the condenser/compressor and the inside of the evaporator. The condenser is the unit that sits outside next to your house, and the evaporator will be located inside, perhaps in the garage or basement.
Before you start your diet, make sure your air conditioner is turned off, or the power switch is turned off. Either way, you don’t want a unit while you’re on the way to cleaning.
Air Conditioner maintenance outside
1. The first thing you want to do is connect your condenser coils leading 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. These can have leaves, dirt, algae, and grass clippings sticking to the fins. You want to do all this and clean it so that your unit can breathe properly. air conditioning You should use a cleaner, but if you don’t have one, just use a water hose with a spray nozzle to clean all the debris he died
3. Give your compressor a good look and see if it’s leaking oil or other fluids.
4. Clean your compressor. Remove any grass or brush that obstructs air flow.
5. Check and see if your air conditioning unit has a port where the oil will go. If they do, just add 4 or 5 drops of oil. If your unit doesn’t have these ports, don’t worry about it. Depending on the age of your unit, you may not have oil ports.
Air conditioner maintenance inside
1. Starting from inside your home, the first thing you need to do is change your filter. It must be changed every month. Even if you have the most expensive allergen, fine dust, and the dust filter… catching is still necessary. it changes every month. While you’re changing the filter, why not clean it with paper towels?
2. The next thing you can do from your unit is stop the evaporator coils if you have access to them. Make sure they are not rusty, dirty or dusty. Simply vacuuming the dust with one of your emotions will do.
3. Check the condensation tube, which collects the condensation water in the coils. Make sure the water it collects flows smoothly and is not obstructed by dirt or algae. This pipe leads outside your house where it deposits all this water. If you look at the opening of this tube, you can tell if the algae has blocked 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, water will drip from the pipes either into your house or the bottom of the evaporator. It depends if the vent inside your house is in the roof or walls.
To collect this condensation inside the tube, gently flowing and free of algae, add only a few teaspoons of bleach to remove the algae. The end of your condensation tube is sealed, but mine is open and it was showing.
I had to put a “U” shaped piece of tubing showing on the end so it could drain. Before the algae slowed down and I ended up with 1 foot of water at the bottom of the well; which is under the rotary evaporator.
As you can see, central air conditioning maintenance is simple and easy. It is not very time consuming and can be completed in one or two hours at most. Try to do air conditioner maintenance at least 3 times a year and you will extend the life of your unit.
Since your unit needs more than just maintenance, then you will find yourself a reliable technician with whom you can develop a solid relationship. I would recommend to any owner who does not have capital, they have larger companies.
I mention this because when I experienced water in the back of 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 around $600 dollars.
I called an air conditioning technician who owned owning his own home business. There was no price for me either. He explained what was going on and showed me how to fix the air conditioner so I wouldn’t run into this problem again.
He vacuumed and cleaned the evaporator coils, cleaned the evaporator tube, checked and cleaned the condenser, added more freon, cleaned around the condenser and charged me $75 dollars. Enough said.
