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As warmer weather starts to hit the Southeast, many homeowners’ thoughts about heating and AC repair turn to the AC side of things as they look to keep their homes cooler in the face of a southern summer. However, as you start to focus on your air conditioner, it’s important that you don’t make the basic mistakes at your home that could lead to you calling your local repair team sooner than you would like. In order to avoid doing damage to your HVAC system, it’s important to follow a few best practices with your air conditioner. Here are a few errors that you need to make sure you aren’t making in your home!

Running the System 24/7

It can be tempting to keep your HVAC running at all hours of the day, especially if you’re the kind of person who is comfortable with colder temperatures in your home. But if you’re like most people you likely leave your home for work at some point in the day, or you might leave the home to run errands that keep your household functioning properly. In either case, your HVAC is still operating, but with nobody in the home to keep cool, which means that it’s essentially wasting energy. Waste too much energy, and you’ll cause your system to fail long before it should, earning an early call to your local heating and AC repair team.

Instead, it’s wise to raise the temperature to around 85 degrees while you’ll be out so that your HVAC isn’t working very hard while you’re away. When you get home, you can then drop your temperature to where you like it. If you’ve got a dog or cat at home, you should instead raise it to about five degrees above where you normally have it. Cats and dogs can tolerate higher temperatures than humans can because their body temperatures are higher, but you don’t want it to be too hot for your furry family member.

Never Running Your Air Conditioner

Surprised to see this on the list? It’s true: failing to use your system can lead to a need for heating and AC repair. That’s because failure to use your HVAC can open it up for mold spores to make their way into the unit and cause real damage to the unit’s ability to cool your home. Unless you never plan to turn on your air conditioner (and if you did, you probably wouldn’t be spending your time reading a blog about heating and AC repair), leaving your air conditioner idle can allow droplets from the cooling units in your system to create a warm, damp environment that’s perfect for mold spores to grow. Instead, it’s wise to run your air conditioner for a few minutes a day every day so that you clear out moisture and keep your unit operation the way it should. This can also protect your indoor air quality, an important part of any air conditioning system considering that most people spend more than 20 hours a day indoors!

Forgetting to Change the Air Filter

Here’s another thing that can damage your indoor air quality and necessitate a call for heating and AC repair sooner than you would like: waiting too long to change your air filter. When you don’t change your air filter on a regular basis, the result isn’t just a drop in your indoor air quality at your Chattanooga, TN home. It also means that debris will get into your HVAC system and prevent it from doing its job properly.

As dirt clogs different parts of your HVAC, the cooling agents inside your system aren’t going to be anywhere near as effective in cooling your home and might even stop working entirely. When that happens, instead of blowing cool air throughout your home, the cooling agents in the system get stuck on the outside of your air conditioner and cause it to freeze over. If your HVAC does freeze over, your system is going to stop working entirely and your home’s temperature will rapidly rise. What does that mean? You guessed it, it means a need for heating and AC repair to thaw out the system and get it working again.

Failing to Use Your Fans

Did you know that ceiling fans are actually designed to work in conjunction with your air conditioner, as opposed to in place of it? It’s true: your ceiling fan is actually meant to move air around the room so that your air conditioner doesn’t have to work as hard. When your HVAC can work less to achieve the same results, it gets a longer lifespan, and that means you can go longer without having to call your heating and AC repair team. Plus, you can use your ceiling fan in conjunction with both functions of your HVAC: all you have to do is switch the direction in the winter when you want to use the heater.

Failing to Do Maintenance

With any machine, it’s vital to make sure to do routine maintenance to keep it operating the way it should. With your HVAC, it’s critical to make sure that you’re doing regular maintenance on the system to catch issues before they trigger the need to call in heating and AC repair experts. Basic maintenance includes things like checking your windows so that you spot any issues with your seals, which can lead to air flying out the sides of your Chattanooga, TN home and an inefficient system that ends up costing you money without cooling you down.

Before you find problems with your HVAC system, it’s a good idea to call in Metro Plumbing, Heating & Air to take a look at your system. They will make sure that you don’t have any problems that could become serious issues that require targeted heating and AC repair. We’re here to help make sure that this spring and summer are as cool and comfortable as possible; give us a call when you need us!