If you live in an older Coastal Bend home, you may have unwanted dust build-up in your A/C unit. Dust reduces A/C efficiency, which can lead to higher energy bills. Since our summers are so hot and muggy, any steps you can take to improve the efficiency of your air conditioner will help reduce high utilities bills during our long cooling season.
Most of the dust and dirt will build up on the blower wheel and the evaporator coil. This build up can cause the system to not move as much air as it should which will cause a loss of capacity and efficiency. This costs you in longer run times on your air conditioner and more expensive utility bills. To clean these two effectively they have to be removed from the system. This requires a professional. Some people will clean an evaporator coil by just brushing the dirt off the surface. This does very little good in most cases. Usually if the surface of a coil is dirty, then the dirt is also embedded deep into the coil and just cleaning the surface will not remove the deep down dirt. The coil has to be removed and pressure cleaned to get all the embedded dirt out. If your coil is more than about eight years old then it is usually more cost effective to replace the coil than to try and clean it. Very old coils when they are cleaned in a lot of cases will create leaks in the drain pan or in the coil tubing itself. Chemical treatments to clean a coil in place usually do not work effectively either.
Using a good high efficiency filter will help to keep your air conditioning equipment clean to where it may never need to have the coil and blower pulled and cleaned. For more information about high efficiency filters look here.
After you have your A/C unit serviced and cleaned of all dust and debris, you should notice an increase in its efficiency. Your bills will drop, and your air conditioner will not have to work as hard to keep your home cool, which offers the added benefit of extending the life of this expensive equipment.
For more information about how dust reduces A/C efficiency and how to clean your cooling system, contact us at CCAC, Inc. We serve Corpus Christi and South Texas and will be happy to help you save energy and money this summer.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about air conditioner efficiency and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Mathews CCAC Air Conditioning and Heating services Corpus Christi, TX. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!