Your Essential Fall AC Maintenance Checklist

Don’t Wait for a Breakdown: The Case for Fall AC Maintenance

As Summer ends, it brings several very familiar and welcome occasions:

  • The beginning of the school year: buying school supplies, meeting new teachers, and taking those “first day in a new grade” pictures for the scrapbook.
  • Friday night lights!!
  • Saturday College Football.
  • The promise of cooler temperatures and lower humidity. The summer was great; everyone loves summer. But Fall has its own pleasures, and everyone looks forward to its arrival.

After months of dealing with the extreme heat and humidity of Summer, this is also a great time to give your air conditioner a much-needed AC maintenance visit, a Fall reset.

Why recommend AC maintenance at the tail-end of summer?

  • The AC components have worked hard all summer long. If there are noticeable weaknesses in the air conditioner’s performance, they will be detected now.
  • An AC maintenance appointment now will prepare it for the cooling season next year.
  • If you have a heat pump, these same components will continue to perform through most of the winter heating season as well.

This hard-working system needs regular AC maintenance to function at peak efficiency. Air conditioner repairs and replacements slow down during the Fall months, so the AC maintenance schedule is less congested.

Clean, Check, Change

AC maintenance tasks may vary, but the most common tasks fall under three categories.

Cleaning

The air filter, so important to indoor air quality and air conditioner function, is a good starting place. If it has been a while since you last changed your filter, expect to hear some encouragement to change the filter at least quarterly.

  • While checking the air filter, if the vents appear to be excessively dusty, our AC maintenance technician may recommend that they be cleaned. (Most air conditioning contractors do not clean vents.)
  • The outdoor condenser unit needs to be cleaned annually. The condenser walls are composed of a vast network of tubes with very thin fins of aluminum. The tubes and fins are designed to dissipate the heat collected inside into the outdoor environment. A large, central fan pulls copious amounts of air through the network to cool them. Sticky pollen, dust, and yard debris get pulled onto and into the network, making the condenser work much harder than it should. A good cleaning with a garden hose washes this collection away.
  • A similar network of tubes is found inside the air conditioner cabinet. This network is called the evaporator coil, and it exposes the hot air from the house to the cold of the refrigerant. Since the air is humid and the evaporator coil is cold, the coil stays wet from the condensation that collects on it. Dust that bypasses the filter will collect here as well, making the evaporator coil work harder. The drain pan that collects the condensation and the drain line that carries it away will also be cleaned and flushed.

Checking

  • The refrigerant pressure level will be checked. A loss in pressure is serious, since it indicates a leak. Loss of refrigerant will bring cooling to a halt and can cause serious damage to expensive components.
  • Electronic controls and sensors will be checked for performance. Constant use creates wear, and this is normal. Common wear patterns happen, so a technician will know where to look first.
  • The thermostat will also be checked. Most thermostats are programmable, but many homeowners do not know how to make scheduled temperature changes. A technician will check thermostat settings and answer questions concerning programming temperature changes.
  • The overall performance of the air conditioning system will also be checked. An air conditioner should provide a minimum temperature change during a cooling cycle. A cooling cycle should achieve the desired temperature change within an acceptable time.

Change

If the cleaning and checking uncover a problem or deficiency, the technician will recommend replacing failing parts before they fail altogether.

Let All Cool Give Your HVAC System the All Clear with Fall AC Maintenance

As summer ends, your AC unit deserves a reset and a professional AC maintenance tune-up to ensure it’s in top condition. This simple AC maintenance call with All Cool AC & Heating can save you from a costly repair down the line and guarantee your comfort for next year. Don’t wait for a breakdown to schedule service—get ahead of the game and enjoy the peace of mind that comes with a well-maintained HVAC system.