What to Do Before Turning Off Your AC System

Summer is over and with it the season of air conditioning. While there may be the occasional warm day ahead that warrants use of the AC, it’ll be nothing like the daily usage of the hottest parts of summer. That means it’s about time for the final maintenance check-up of the year, before you start thinking about furnaces and the challenges of efficient winter heating.

Why Check Your AC After Summer?

As the hot season winds down and you start thinking about your furnace and heating solutions, it may seem counterintuitive to perform AC maintenance. But it’s important that you take care of your AC now, before it sits unused for the better part of the year. You don’t want to go to start it up next year and find a problem you’ve let sit unattended when you need your AC most! These will also help keep costs down on those occasions where you need to use your AC during the cooler seasons of the year.

Check Your Filter

A frequent piece of advice for any HVAC maintenance, and for good reason. You want to check your filters as often as you can, and clean or replace them as necessary. If anything unusual has made its way into your air conditioner filters, you want to notice it now and clean it up before it has most of the year to grow and infiltrate more sensitive parts of your system.

Look for Debris

Look around your air conditioner for anything that stands out as being out of place. It’s common as the summer winds down for your air conditioner to end up a bit wetter and more humid, due to running less consistently. This is a good opportunity for all sorts of nasty things to start growing on the unit. If that happens, you want to notice it now, not at the beginning of next summer.

Wash It

The end of summer’s a great time to go ahead and give your external air conditioning unit a wash if you have one. It’s no doubt coated in pollen, grass clippings, and all the other residue of summer; wash all that off now so you don’t have to worry about it breaking down, growing mold, and getting particles in your unit that you don’t want in there.

Set Up Your Fans

This is less a specific aspect of air conditioner maintenance, and more a general recommendation for end of summer HVAC. While the weather transitions between intense heat and intense cold, you can save money by bumping your air conditioner thermostat up a bit higher and relying on fans more. It’s a good way to save a bit of money before the inevitable expense of winter heating, and it’ll help ventilate your home to prevent that humidity build up we mentioned earlier.

Schedule HVAC Maintenance

You really ought to have professional tuning and general HVAC maintenance performed at least once a year (twice optimally), so take the opportunity to schedule a check-up for your air conditioner now. Have a professional drop by and check things out a month or so before you’d start using your air conditioner again, and you won’t have to worry about nasty surprises when you go to use it.

Find Out More with Total Air & Heat in Dallas

If you’d like to learn more about AC maintenance, preparing for the cool seasons ahead, or any other aspect of HVAC, contact us today. You can discuss preventative maintenance, schedule a check-up for your AC or other HVAC equipment, or we can talk about options for upgrades and improvements.