With all the different maintenance tasks to keep your home in good condition, it’s easy to question the value of a maintenance agreement. Discover why HVAC maintenance is so important, and why a maintenance agreement is worth every penny for your home.
What Does HVAC Maintenance Include?
Before looking at the benefits of having a maintenance agreement, take a few minutes to understand what maintenance includes. A technician conducts three overarching functions while maintaining your furnace and air conditioner. They start with a visual inspection of and testing your equipment. They then move to deep cleaning to remove airborne contaminants that have accumulated throughout the system. Finally, they’ll check and tighten the mounting hardware and electrical connections throughout the system.
While these tasks may not seem like a huge deal, they have a significant impact on how your system functions and what you can expect. Further, investing in a maintenance plan has additional benefits you’ll appreciate that go beyond the one-time tune-up.
Improved HVAC Performance
The air your system draws in contains a variety of airborne particles, including dust, pollen, dander, hair, and more. Your air filter catches most of the particles before they can clog the system. However, the smallest particles flow through the filter, landing on components like your heat exchanger, evaporator coil, and circulating fan wheel.
When this happens, the amount of air these components will pass slowly declines, reducing your system’s efficiency. Reduced efficiency translates into higher utility expenses while trying to maintain a comfortable temperature throughout your home.
As your maintenance technician works on your system, they’ll clean the areas that cause airflow restrictions. This ensures your system can both draw, condition, and then push air back into your home. The better your system can circulate air, the less energy it takes to heat and cool your residence.
Better Home Comfort
One of the implications of less air moving through your HVAC system is less air coming from your vents. To understand why this impacts your system, you have to understand how your conditioned air heats and cools your entire home.
Your central HVAC system has two types of vents around your home, the supply vents and the return vents. Air coming from the supply vent creates a high pressure, while air going into the return vents creates low pressure. The nature of gas attempts to keep the pressure equal throughout a specific area, your house being that area in this case. Therefore, the pressure differences around your home create a circulating effect, helping distribute heated and cooled air.
An airflow restriction somewhere in your system interrupts that pressure difference. The result is less circulation of the heated air around your home, leaving the temperature inconsistent in different parts of your house. By keeping the system clean, you ensure it can circulate air effectively, allowing your entire home to receive the conditioned air.
More Reliability
Your system experiences strain as it runs, with certain variables exerting more strain than others. First, the temperature outside and your thermostat setting affect the system’s operational strain. The greater the difference between the outside air and the thermostat’s set temperature, the greater the strain it’ll experience.
Additionally, a lack of air moving through the system also contributes to excess strain. This happens because it allows extreme temperatures to develop within the unit, putting excessive wear on the components. A lack of air moving through the unit also leads to either extended heating and cooling cycles or short cycling. Both of these increase the amount of stress on the system as a whole.
When you combine excessive strain due to neglected maintenance with extreme outside temperatures, it becomes too much for the system to handle. This is why units fail more during extreme weather than they would in more mild conditions. By properly maintaining your system, you reduce unnecessary stress, making your system more reliable during those weather conditions and high temperatures.
Fewer Repairs and Longer Service Life
The increased strain previously discussed causes excessive wear on the individual HVAC components. More wear translates into those parts failing more quickly, requiring a component replacement. Unfortunately, that excessive wear also impacts critical components like the heat exchanger and AC compressor. Failure of these components most commonly results in needing to replace the entire furnace or air conditioner.
A properly maintained furnace should efficiently serve your home for 15 to 20 years, and an air conditioner should last 10 to 15 years. However, neglecting your routine maintenance could reduce that service life by half or more.
Two Annual Visits and Reminder Calls
Your system needs both maintenances for your furnace and air conditioning, which are typically conducted at different times. The former is in the spring and focuses on getting your air conditioner ready for the hot months. The latter is done in the fall, preparing your furnace for the colder weather.
Paying for maintenance is not usually an obstacle. Rather, it’s remembering to make the call to schedule your maintenance before there’s an issue that makes you think about it. With a maintenance agreement, you don’t have to try to remember to schedule these appointments. Instead, we’ll call you to get them scheduled at your convenience.
Protects Your HVAC Warranty
When you installed your furnace or AC, you probably considered the warranty that came with it. The challenge with these manufacturer warranties is hidden in the fine print, in the terms of the warranty.
Having routine maintenance for your system is one common term you’ll find in the fine print for most manufacturers. The reason is that while the manufacturer wants to ensure their equipment works, they also understand the strain that neglect causes. If a component wears out in a system with neglected maintenance, it didn’t fail due to a manufacturing defect and it wouldn’t be covered.
Discounted and Priority Repair Service
One of the goals of maintenance is to identify small problems early before they can compound and cause additional damage. This alone reduces the repair costs, keeping them to minor inconveniences rather than major catastrophic components.
While identifying those issues is a part of maintenance, the repairs themselves are not. However, a maintenance plan with Healthy Home Heating & Cooling LLC also gives you a discount on those repairs. In fact, you’ll save 20% on the cost of repairs when they’re needed.
The other challenge with repairs is that they usually happen during the hottest and coldest times of the year, when others are experiencing the same thing. This creates a dynamic where you’re often waiting for the repairs when you need your system most. Our customers with maintenance agreements get priority scheduling, being you’ve already made the effort to keep your system running. You’ll have your system up and running quickly so that you stay comfortable throughout the year.
Healthy Home Heating & Cooling LLC has provided award-winning heating and cooling service to residents around De Pere, WI, since 2005. Our clients trust us to provide heating and air conditioning maintenance, installation, and repair as well as humidity control solutions. Visit our website for more information or give us a call to sign up for one of our maintenance agreement plans today!
