In just a couple of short months, summer will officially be upon us. When summer does arrive, homeowners have to be ready. This means ensuring that your air conditioner is in great shape and ready to handle whatever Mother Nature brings its way.
The best way to ensure your air conditioner is ready for summer is with maintenance. During professional maintenance, our technicians comprehensively inspect, clean, and adjust components of the system that need it. We will also alert you to any repair needs we find so you can get those on your schedule right away and don’t have to wait for a breakdown to occur. Maintenance helps your air conditioner perform as effectively as it’s meant to, and as efficiently as possible, too.
With or without maintenance though, there are a number of things you can do to boost and maintain AC efficiency, such as:
Raising the Temperature on the Thermostat
We get it—this sounds like strange advice, right? Why would you want to make it hotter than normal inside your home? Well, the truth is that many homeowners are making it colder than it needs to be. In order to maintain comfort, most people are perfectly fine with thermostat settings around 78°F, yet many people set theirs to 71 or 72, thinking it will help their home cool down faster. This actually doesn’t work the way you think it would—it just means your air conditioner will run longer.
You will save both energy and money by raising the temperature to a more reasonable level. It also helps if you raise the temperature when you’re not at home or when you’re sleeping—times that you don’t actually need your air conditioner.
Utilize Your Ceiling Fans
Ceiling fans can’t replace air conditioner of course, but they can certainly help your cooling efficiency efforts. While a fan won’t lower the temperature of the room, it will help your body feel cooler. This is because fans help to evaporate sweat from your body to keep you cool. So, you’re able to turn your thermostat up a couple of degrees, and therefore use less energy.
This is because when you use your AC system in combination with ceiling fans, the fans help push cool air down and evenly distribute it, while keeping warm air rising, for more effective and efficient AC use.
Change the Air Filter
There aren’t many air conditioner tasks that we recommend homeowners try to accomplish on their own. However, changing the air filter is definitely something you can, and should, do yourself, every 1-3 months.
The air filter that comes standard with your HVAC systems can get clogged up with debris like dust and dirt, which prevents the air conditioner from appropriately drawing in warm air from your home. This means that the air conditioner will struggle to do the job that it was designed for and therefore work inefficiently.
Keep Everything Clean
Part of professional maintenance involves our team cleaning the interior components of your system, but you can also do your part to keep the outdoor system clean. Make sure it’s unobstructed and clear of debris like lawn mulch, leaves, twigs, etc. before you start using it for summer. This will help allow for appropriate airflow so your system doesn’t lose efficiency.
Contact Covenant Heating and Cooling for quality AC repair in Brentwood, TN.