How to Maintain an Air Conditioner

Video Transcript

"Okay, hi, I'm Tim Gipson, and I'm going to talk to you about how to maintain an air conditioner. Now, to really get long service out of your air conditioner, it's a good idea to contract with a professional company to have your units maintained. At least once a year on your air conditioning unit. Most units today particularly in the southeast regions are heating, ventilating and air conditioning or what we call HVAC. So you'll have a heating unit and then you have a cooling unit portion. Now one thing you want to do before you work on your air conditioning unit, is you want to make sure in the main power box that you go ahead and flip the switch. Okay, you never want to work around any part of your air conditioning system without first cutting off the main power. So once we've done that, then we can go ahead and go back and start working on our air conditioning unit. Now we're out here and as you can see one thing is we mow the yard and just as debris kicks around, I've pulled the sides off this air conditioner unit. As you can see we've got a lot of grass that has accumulated. So during the summer months, it's important even with your maintenance plans, you want to take apart your condensers and just take a hose and we want to clear out all the grass, so you can see is I'm spraying down these coils. And what we want to do is we want to spray and get all the debris away. Now as you can see a standard hose works pretty well for clearing these areas, and you want to be really careful when you're working around these. These veins are what actually provide the air to cool and recondense your freon. So you want to be very careful as you're working around these. You don't want to damage or dent these veins at all. So be very careful while you're working around this. Now a regular hose would do pretty well in removing a lot of the debris and the grass. If you have one, it's also not a bad idea to invest in a power washer. The power washer will do a much better job and you want to use just a standard fan spray for doing that. Now, if you'll do this at least once a month during the grass cutting season, it'll help your air conditioner run much more efficiently. So I'm Tim Gipson and that's how to maintain your air conditioner."