Coil Cleaning & Filter Programs

Two Tasks, Most of the Damage

Strip away everything else and commercial HVAC failure comes down to two things going wrong: the equipment cannot reject heat, or it cannot move air. A fouled condenser coil causes the first. A loaded filter causes the second. Almost every expensive downstream failure — high head pressure, compressor overheating, a frozen evaporator, a burned-out blower motor — traces back to one of them.

The physics is unforgiving. A condenser coil packed with dust and cottonwood cannot dump heat, so head pressure climbs, so the compressor draws more current and runs hotter, so it consumes more energy every hour it runs and it dies earlier than it should. None of that shows up as a service call until the day the machine finally locks out — but you have been paying for it, on the power bill, the entire time.

Texas makes this worse. Long cooling seasons, high ambient temperatures, dust, pollen, and — for anything above a restaurant — a steady coating of grease-laden kitchen exhaust that turns a condenser coil into a felt pad.

Getting Filters Right