When your air systems are working correctly, then they will be constantly working to freshen up your home. The air being pumped in is coming straight from outside, so you know that is as fresh as possible. But is it as clean as possible? That’s actually a different question that involves the use of air filters in a system. These tools act as cleansers that make sure that the air coming into your home is kept as clean as possible. However, the filters will need maintenance in order to work properly over time.
Cleaning Up Dirty Air
The air coming into your home may not be the cleanest, and that is mainly due to environmental factors around your home. The fact of the matter is there may be all kinds of allergens or pollutants being brought in by air systems. The systems do their job by constantly bringing in airflow. They are not capable of discerning the good air from the bad, they bring in whatever they can as fast as they can. This is where the air filters in your systems come into place.
Air filters are made from a tight mesh weaving designed to capture passing irritants and pollutants. The weaving for air filters is actually ranked on a set scale known as a MERV rating. The ratings change depending on the filter, with tighter weaving leading to a higher rating. The average home filter often comes with more moderate ratings. This is because tighter mesh weaving becomes a problem for airflow and becomes dirtier at a faster rate.
Dirty Air Filters and Maintenance
The tight mesh weaving inside of an air filter is not capable of staying effective forever. The filter becomes dirtier over time and less effective as it becomes covered in the particles it captures. No irritants make their way through, but neither does air, leading to dryness and stagnation throughout your home. There will also be an increase in the energy billing in your home. Your air systems will try to push airflow through the dirtier filters, but when that air is blocked it will increase its efforts. The resulting rise in electricity costs will cause the energy billing for your home to see a spike at the end of every month.
In order to prevent your air filters from causing problems requiring AC repair throughout your home, you will need to consistently replace the dirty air filters with clean, new ones. You need to do this as often as once per month for some homes in order to keep the air systems working at full capacity. The first thing you will need to do is find out the size of the filters you need. Common sizes like 19×20 are often found with reliable suppliers, who will have plenty of other sizes available if you need them. The rest of the process is as easy as taking the old filter out and putting a new one in so that your home stays fresh and clean.
