Five Inspection Points on Your Air Conditioner

The air conditioner is your best friend when the summer comes. It’s as simple as that. It can also be your worst enemy when it isn’t working all that well. It is not advised that you leave that AC neglected, especially right before the cooling season, when you are really going to need it.

Without question, an air conditioner should be inspected before summer. There are certain things you can do by yourself, and others that you should probably have a professional HVAC service person look at. This becomes an economical move when you consider you can avoid costly repair bills down the road if you do them.

Here are five inspection points that concern the AC:

1. The coils that are located in both the interior and exterior components of your AC system need to be cleaned. You simply can’t afford to have dirt building up on either of them, because that is really going to slow down the efficient operation of your air conditioner.
2. What are you going to do about your refrigerant level? Remember that if you have too much or too little, your air conditioning is going to work far below its optimum efficiency. This may be a job for an AC professional to take on, since they are specially trained to recognize and deal with the refrigerant levels on AC units.
3. We highly recommend that you take a look at the filter on your air conditioner, and do it on a regular basis. And regardless of what you find when you do that, your all well-advised to change the filter at the intervals that are suggested by the manufacturer.
4. If you have a window or wall unit, please take a look at the way that the air conditioner is inserted in there. What we mean is that the seal should be very “snug,” and not have any leaks. If there are indeed leaks or cracks, you can fill those in. This is commonly done with caulk, although if the leak is big enough, you might be able to use foam. The bottom line is that you don’t want for the cold air you are generating to seep outside of the house.
5. This is not of a mechanical nature, but make a point of checking for leaves, dirt and debris around the outside package (condenser, compressor, coil). You don’t want anything to block what is supposed to be going on with your system.