AttemptGreen.com

Now that the temperatures are getting colder, it is time to turn the furnace on.  That also means it is time to consider any kind of maintenance that needs done to your furnace.  Most of the stuff I don’t know a whole lot about, but I do know about filters.

Replacing the filter in the furnace is extremely important.  The filter’s job is to collect little particles of stuff in the air before it gets pushed into the rest of the house.  All of these little particles accumulate on the filter and eventually build-up.  The air that is being heated by the furnace is blown into the filter (and the build-up) and into the rest of the house.  If there is enough build-up on the filter, the furnace is going to run longer than it needs to just because that air can’t flow freely into the house to heat it up.  This is why it is so important to replace your filter regularly.

Confession time.  A few years ago, we were working on updating our basement.  This included a lot of patching and sanding the mud used for drywall.  This stuff creates a ton of small particles in the air.  It was summer time and the air conditioner was running (the air conditioner uses the same filter as the furnace).  I started to notice that the air conditioner seemed to run forever and eventually it was actually hotter inside the house than outside.  I thought our air conditioner had broke.  Turns out, we just had to replace the filter.  All the little dust particles had built up in the filter not allowing the cold air to pass into the rest of the house.  So this just proves how important it is to replace the filter.

Tags: environment, green, maintenance

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 22nd, 2008 at 11:27 pm and is filed under Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.