I have been planning a week-long vacation for numerous months now.
My task can be quite stressful at times, so I decided that what I really needed was a ‘staycation’, meaning that I would use my vacation time to stay home, relax, and tend to my to-do list… Unfortunately, cleaning and cleaning out were at the top of my list.
My air conditioner component was one of the items that desperately needed to be cleaned. A year’s worth of dirt and debris had jammed the cooling fins, and I know that this was affecting my air conditioner’s efficiency. I turned off the power to the air conditioner, affixed an extension cord to my vacuum cleaner, then dragged it outside to the outside unit. I unscrewed and disaffixed the metal box covering the fins, then – with the soft brush affixment to my vacuum cleaner – I carefully vacuumed each of the cooling system fins. There was an incredible amount of debris to be cleaned off, since the central fan sucks the outside air through the fins. In fact, I had to detach a lot of dead leaves from the fins before vacuuming them. I observed that some of the fins were slightly bent, which is no surprise since they look so fragile. I am not the original owner of the home, so perhaps the previous owner had caused damage to the cooling system unit. I figured that I could re-straighten some of the fins with a blunt supper knife. Unfortunately, as I worked my way around the unit, I found even more bent fins. I decided at that point to call an Heating and Air Conditioning professional to do the repair. I had too several other things to get done on my staycation!