I cannot count how many times I've received a service call for a unit not cooling properly, and arrived to find a dirty, caked, coil blanketed by all manner of treacherous debris. When such calls come in I do not begin troubleshooting diagnostics until all coils (indoor and outdoor) have been inspected.. This may seem like a job that doesn't take a technician to diagnose, and you're probably right; however, most homeowners fail to grasp the importance of a shiny, clean coil because the task seems so tedious. That's where the technician shines. A good technician not only knows the proper way to professionally clean the coil, but understand why this needs to be done bi-annually at most, and the havoc a dirty coil can reek on said system. If you learn nothing else from my (sometimes dubious) blogs, let coil health be the thing you do learn.
First we need to understand how the coil works to cool. At SkillCatApp we have MANY courses on the refrigeration cycle, which every technician should be familiar with before working on a refrigerant fed system. For now, I will sum it up into a very short description. The coils job is to absorb heat from the indoor space and disperse that heat to the outdoors, then loop back into the indoor unit cooling the space, and absorbing more heat and so on in a loop infinitely. When we understand this, we can imagine why proper air flow is so incredibly important! It boils down to one fact: if air cannot freely pass between coils, the refrigerant cannot carry the heat out of the room as it was designed to, making your room hot, and your energy cost high!
In summary, keeping coils clean is the only way to achieve maximum cooling and efficiency out of your HVAC system. Anyone can clean a coil, every tech should know why!
As always,
Be Kind HVAChicks~Thats what sets us apart!