How to Winterize Your HVAC System

The best time to prep HVAC for winter is before winter arrives. Preparing your HVAC system before the cold temperatures hit means you can make sure it’s working properly before it has to heat your home all the time. Here are some HVAC winter maintenance tips that will keep your heating system running well throughout the cold-weather months.

Commercial HVAC Winter Prep Tips

Check, Clean, or Replace Air Filters

Check all your system’s air filters and clean them out. If they haven’t been replaced in at least a few months, replace them with new filters. Why should you pay this much attention to your air filters? Because dirty filters can lower your facility’s indoor air quality and increase your energy costs. Check and clean your air filters at least 3 to 4 times per year to keep them in good working order, including right before winter begins.

Schedule a Preventative Maintenance Visit

Regular preventative maintenance will reduce the number of major problems your commercial HVAC system experiences, and it will make your system more energy efficient. During this kind of maintenance visit, a technician will test the major aspects of your heating and cooling system to make sure it will run properly well into the winter months. HVAC emergencies often occur during extremely cold or extremely hot weather, so it’s best to have an HVAC winter tune-up performed before severely cold weather settles in.

A winter preventative maintenance visit should include:

Checking for cracks, holes, and leaks in the heating system
Checking for debris and blockages in blowers and hoses
Making sure the heat exchangers don’t leak carbon monoxide
Cleaning the boiler tubes
Calibrating the thermostat and the water pressure gauge

Having your air conditioners and furnaces tuned up will help your system run well throughout the winter, so the furnace will produce warm air no matter how much the temperatures drop outside.

Check Your Programmable Thermostat

Make sure your programmable thermostat operates properly and determine what its most energy efficient settings are. A technician can repair and calibrate your thermostat during the preventative maintenance visit if necessary. After you determine those settings, develop a plan to use the most energy efficient settings and temperatures to heat your facility while keeping your energy bills low.

Why are HVAC Tips for Winter So Important?

It’s important to follow these HVAC tips because winter temperatures in the Chicago area get frigidly cold, especially in recent years. In January 2019, the two coldest days were -21 and -23 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively, both of which were record lows. Imagine you and your colleagues and employees are working in your facility when it’s -23 degrees outside, and your commercial HVAC system stops working. You’re suddenly faced with the challenge of keeping everyone warm in temperatures well below zero while trying to reach an HVAC company that can resolve your HVAC emergency. It’s safe to say that your business’s productivity will drop as everyone tries to stay warm, leading to considerable downtime until your HVAC system is repaired.

Preparing your HVAC system for winter will save you time and money in the long run. For example, if you work with a technician to clear your system of blockages during the fall, warm air can flow freely through it during the winter coldest winter days. If you don’t clear out the blockages, your system will have to work harder to send air around the blockages. When an HVAC system has to run daily while experiencing multiple problems, it will have to work harder and harder until it begins to breakdown. It’s when the breakdowns occur that your business will experience downtime and lost productivity.

Find Your Business’s HVAC Comfort Level with Us

Air Comfort will provide the winter tune-up your system needs to run well no matter how far Chicago-area temperatures drop. We will inspect, clean, and clear out your system so it doesn’t have to work harder to heat your facility. At Air Comfort, we offer a wide range of additional services as well. We can perform commercial building audits to determine how well your system operates; install building automation systems (BAS) to streamline your HVAC controls; retrofit older HVAC systems so you can maximize your current system; and offer emergency HVAC services to repair your systems when major breakdowns occur.