An important factor in maintaining an air conditioning unit is keeping it clean and well maintained. Not only does good maintenance reduce energy consumption and save on monthly bills, but a clean condenser coil will keep your air conditioner unit running longer and operating efficiently. So the key points for cleaning the central air conditioning condenser coil include several aspects?

How often and how often will the unit be cleaned?

Under normal circumstances, it is recommended to clean the compressor coil and fins of the outdoor unit once a year, but if there are a lot of plants around or nearby cottonwood or dandelion, you should clean it more often. These are the culprits. For comfort and cost savings, here are common chores you can perform on your air conditioner unit. For this project you will need a garden hose, a good spray foam cleaner and a fin comb if the fins are badly bent. A basic tool like a wrench or screwdriver is required to remove the A/C unit cover. You'll also need to buy a store vacuum and a medium-hard brush (but be very careful when cleaning the fins, they're very fragile and bend easily.

I always make sure the thermostat is set to "off" before doing anything. Then I removed the main power switch located inside the main switch panel. The main switch is almost always installed on the house with the device itself. Just open the panel and pull out the big plug. Once the power is cut off, you should remove as much debris, debris, and lawn clippings from the outside of the unit as possible that may obstruct air flow.

Remove the top of the device. Typically, you can see hex head bolts or screws on the top or top side of the unit. careful! Fan motors are usually mounted on top of the unit and you don't want to bend or damage the blades. Have someone hold the top of the unit or set it aside carefully to make sure it doesn't rest on the fan blades or stretch the wiring.

You can easily clean the bottom of the inside of the device with a store vacuum. You never know what you will find inside! You may need to repel rodents or snakes, but most of the time you just need to remove dirt, leaves and dead grass. Then, use the brush attachment on your portable vacuum and vacuum carefully.

After evacuating the heatsink, spray the outside of the heatsink with a good quality coil cleaner and wait 5 minutes. A mild detergent/water mixture will also work well. Then, simply use a garden hose to spray water from the inside of the unit to the outside until the water is completely through and clean. If your unit doesn't spread out, spray to avoid fan motors as much as possible.

Either way, direct spraying of the compressor should be avoided. If you can't stand it, and spray the outside of the device, be careful not to bend the heat sinks surrounding the coils with pressurized water!

It is not recommended to spray water on the outside of the unit, as you could get too much water inside the unit, or stuff dust and particles deep into the fins, or both.

You can place the cover (removed part that previously housed the fan motor) on top of the unit for the next step: using the cooling fin comb, carefully clean the fins and straighten them if they are badly bent. This may take some time if the fins are bent a lot.

The heatsink comb is not easy to maneuver, but the heat dissipation capacity of the heatsink is very important to the performance of the device, so it is definitely worth it to take as much effort as possible to straighten any bent heatsinks.

You can easily figure out how many teeth you need on your fin comb by just using a tape measure and counting the number of fins in an inch. That's the "number of teeth" you should buy for a fin straightening comb. Most fin combs have 4 types of combs with different numbers of teeth.

Reverse the removal steps by replacing the top of the unit in the same manner as it was removed. Then, plug back into the mains, and go inside, turn the thermostat to the "cold" position, and lower the temperature setting just enough for the unit to start. Many devices have timing mechanisms that delay their startup by several minutes. Go back outside, listen to the strange noise (once the unit is back on), double check everything, and assemble everything correctly. If you hear an unusual noise and don't know what it is, then I recommend calling a stepless condenser cleaning professional to have your system checked for you.

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