Hi fellow Hiveians,

Today I wanted to talk about the importance of routinely checking and changing the common things in the house: air filters!

Maintaining Air Quality

I know not everyone has central air conditioning and heating, which provides heat and air conditioning in the same device. We have that where we live and it's pretty incredible and saves us quite a bit of hassle and headache where we have to keep up one thing instead of multiple different ones.

The important thing, with anything owning a house, is making sure that you do the routine maintenance on it! Part of that routine maintenance is to make sure that you clean the air filters periodically by changing them, so that the quality of air in your house is as good as it can be. I took the time to swap out our air filter the other day and wanted to share some solid practices!

One of the first things that's a good idea is to put a date on your air filter! It's important to do that somewhere so that you know when you changed it. You could add it to your phone calendar if you want but I am old fashioned and just write it right on the filter, no fuss no muss.

The crazy thing is how much dust and junk gets accumulated on the vent cover! I don't do this every 6 months, I do it every year in the winter time because the summertime is when we get more use out of it, and are more likely to get the hair and dust to clump up. The winter we don't use the unit as often because it's a little easier to heat the house up. Doing laundry, cooking, cleaning and just doing regular house chores warms you up and also adds some heat to the house so that's what we do on most days.

The giant clump of dust and crap is gross though isn't it?! Lol

This is something that I don't do normally, but figured I might as well give it a look and a try. I went up into the unit itself, with the power off of course, and just did a brief cleaning of the motor and fan blades. I didn't go crazy because I didn't want to mess with anything or even potentially get an electric shock if I touched the wrong thing but I did a decent surface clean on it and it ended up looking better than when I started it, so that was a win! It's good to do this every few years, I don't think you need to do it all the time. This was my first time doing it since I moved in, and I know my wife never did it, and there wasn't really a whole lot of stuff on there. Likely because this thing is moving so quickly, so that was a good thing.

The new filter is ready, clean as hell looking, and waiting to go right back into place! I guess I forgot to snap a picture of the old filter but it was pretty dark and grimy looking, which you can imagine by those clumps of dust I cleaned off the protective grate covering the air return for the unit. I love the look of a nice new clean filter! Makes you breathe easier for sure, literally and figuratively haha.

This was also the before and after of the grate covering the air vent. That thing was dirty as shit! Lol. I cleaned that thing up as good as I could, I didn't want to go nuts and get every single fine little thing because I wasn't in a spot where I had a significant amount of time but I made sure to get as much of the stuff as I could. It worked out pretty well I think!

The important thing about this is that it prolongs the life of your equipment, because it reduces the load a little bit on the device for pulling in the air from the return, when there isn't a bunch of dust and hair blocking the way. It also only took 30 minutes of my time, and a new filter! That is something that someone would charge 200$ or more to come out and do, and I did it for the cost of the air filter really. Solid use of time and money I think!

^-CmplXty. _{Real human written content, never AI.}

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