How to Clean Coils on a Central Air Conditioner Unit

A central air conditioner is a unit that spreads cold air throughout your home or business. The air is pushed through several coils that move the air. These coils should be cleaned once a year to help avoid allergy problems and to save money on your electricity bill.

Turn off Electricity

Before working on any appliance or other devices affected by electricity, it is important to remove the electric source from the device. With a central air conditioner, you will want to turn off the electricity to your whole house. Though you can do this with your breaker box, it is smarter to call your electric company and have them turn off your electricity for you.

Locate Your Main Unit

If you do not know where the main part of your unit is installed, you will want to look around for it. Generally, you can find panels that cover it outside your home of office, on the side of the building, however, they can be located on the back of the building, on the ground near your home or office or even on the roof.

Once you have located the panels covering your air conditioner, remove the panels by unscrewing the screws with a screwdriver. Make sure that the area around you is clean so that nothing will fall and hurt the air conditioner while you are working. After everything is unscrewed, pull the panel away from the air conditioner, taking note of how you removed it so that you will be able to reattach it easily.

Spray the Coils

Once you have located the coils, spray them with water. The easiest way to do this is to have a spray nozzle attached to your garden hose. After you have wet down all of you coils, spray a degreaser on them and allow the degreaser to sit on the coils for over half an hour.

Rinse the Coils

Once the degreaser has set on the coils, rinse a portion of a coil to make sure that the degreaser worked. If it has not fully cleaned the coils, it may need to sit a little longer.

If the coils are clean, you will want to rinse the coils with your hose nozzle. Make sure it is getting the heaviest water pressure possible to make sure the water will knock off all the grease and grime on the coils. To make sure you don’t cause yourself injury, make sure you stand away from the pressure of the coils, at least 2 to 3 feet away. Also make sure that the nozzle is about a foot away from the coils so that the water pressure will not harm the system.

Finishing Up

Allow the coils to fully dry before reattaching the panel to the outside of the air conditioner. After attaching the panel, you can alert your power company to turn your electricity back on.

By maintaining your air conditioning coils, you will make sure that your unit will work longer and more efficiently.