Your HVAC system may harbor many allergens, especially your air ducts. Moisture in the home can cause mold and mildew which can hide in the air ducts and spread throughout the home. Air ducts are also a great place for dust to build up and cause allergies. If you have pets, smoke cigarettes, or have a humid house your air ducts may need to be cleaned more often than other homes.

If you’ve had a home remodel where carpet and tile were disturbed you will definitely want to follow up with an air duct cleaning as the dust from a remodel will travel to the air ducts which may potentially make you ill.

If you do have allergies you will want to make sure to have your air ducts cleaned regularly to keep your family healthy. Simply having your air ducts cleaned can help to keep the need for medications down.

It's very important to worry about your indoor air quality. On average, a person drinks .5 gallons of water a day, but they breathe 2,000 gallons of air every day. This is why you should take special care and interest in your indoor air quality.

To answer that question, let's compare AC units with your body

An outdoor unit is like your heart and the indoor unit is like your lungs. The pipe is similar to your arteries and veins and the refrigerant is your blood.

The compressor pumps the refrigerant to the indoor unit to make the heat exchanger and the blower circulate the air through the filter media. Just like our bodies need a periodic health check, so does our AC need the same care and maintenance.

Regular maintenance is very important to investigate and catch the problems before they happen.

It is very important to know about any devices recommended to add to your AC system to improve your indoor air quality.

1. Do you know exactly what the specific device is going to do?
2. What that device creates as a byproduct or what emissions come out when it is operating?
3. Is the person who's recommending the device going to install it and is qualified on what they are doing?
4. Are you allergic towards any of those devices?
5. Why are you willing to install and what caused the recommendation to install the indoor air quality device?

Think of your HVAC system as a respiratory system. There are many components that work together to keep you breathing. Your home HVAC system delivers air to the different rooms of your home much like a respiratory system delivering air throughout your body. Imagine if the air that came into your lungs were full of dust, pet dander, smoke, and mold. You would become very ill, and it would be hard to breathe. If the air that is being pushed throughout your home’s HVAC system were full of these particles, then you are also breathing them into YOUR lungs. You can see how your HVAC system could cause allergic reactions such as respiratory problems, skin rashes, allergies, and possibly worse. This is why it is so important to ensure that your HVAC system is regularly cleaned to keep you healthy.

If you find that your energy bills are climbing, or you are constantly having to turn down the AC to feel comfortable this may be a sign that it’s time to have your system serviced. If the air in your home is becoming stale and day-to-day orders such as cooking or pet orders are lingering longer than normal, it may be time to call for maintenance.

Your HVAC has many components to keep it working. Each component has a job to do to help keep you cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Most of these components have electric parts and some even have motors. While there are many things that most people can do to help to prolong the life of their system, like changing your air filters regularly, there are things that should only be trusted to a professional. Just like there are things we can do to help prolong the life of our vehicles, another complex machine, there is also a time to take it to a professional mechanic to do the annual service to keep our vehicles running as they were built to.

There are a few things that can be done by the homeowner between maintenance services to ensure the longevity of your unit. Simple things like regularly changing the air filter can help ensure that your family is breathing in clean air. Keeping the coils clean can help your unit to run more efficiently. And inspecting the condensate drain to make sure it isn’t clogged is another way to protect one of your home’s biggest and most important investments.