An air conditioning expert advises that if your unit isn’t cooling your house like you’re supposed to, it might need a bit of maintenance that you can do at home with a common household item.
The AC hack comes from the TikTok account for Stay Cool Climate Control (@staycoolclimatecontrol), an HVAC service company in O’Fallon, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. In it, a technician walks through how to make your air conditioning unit more efficient with a little at-home maintenance. The video has generated more than 1.1 million views and close to 9,400 likes as of Tuesday, after going up on Saturday.
He begins, “Anyone having issues with their air conditioner cooling down … the outdoor unit needs to be clean. The outdoor unit’s job is to reject heat.”
He then instructs, “So if you have a standard water hose with just a standard nozzle on it, that’s going to be fine. You don’t want a power washer unit. That’s gonna bend the fins inside there and cause more damage. So, literally, all you have to do is take the hose at a 45-degree angle and start spraying from the top down. And if you have like a good film on the unit, you’re gonna see it start peeling off.”
He adds, “90 percent of the time, our clients will have dirty outdoor units, and that’s just going to lower the capacity of how much it can cool your house. So again, just take your water hose around all four sides of the unit, working from the top down, and peel on that stuff back, and that’s going to help it reject heat a lot better.”
@staycoolclimatecontrol Here’s how to properly clean your outdoor unit #hvac #hvactechnician #helpfultips #cleaning #homeowner #homeownertips #airconditioner ♬ original sound – Stay Cool Climate Control
Other sources agree that hosing down your AC unit is a good idea. In 2019, WFMY-TV in Greensboro, North Carolina, answered a viewer’s question about this for a segment called “Verify.” The station’s reporter contacted a source they identified as “home guru Tom Garcia.”
He said, “One of the biggest problems with AC units behind the home is debris. Many times you put a bush around the AC unit just to hide it. The problem is the bush grows bigger and bigger every year, and it’s into the space of the AC unit.”
He then added, “Especially at the end of summer, as we’re cutting the grass, the grass gets pulled into the AC unit. The problem with that is it starts to clog up the vents here. The vent can’t get the proper air flow, and it can’t cool down the home as it should. It’s so simple. All we need to do is take a hose end and spray it down. The AC unit can handle getting wet. Drive all the material, all the debris, spiders and all that stuff back out, and get it nice and clean.”
Commenters on Stay Cool Climate Control’s video had questions and observations.
“Do I need to unplug it from the breaker first?” one asked.
The company representative replied, “You can. It’s not a huge deal if you aren’t taking it apart.”
Another said, “HVAC guy told me to spray from the inside out.”
The representative responded, “That is the best way and that is the way we do it in the field; this video is for home owners.”
One viewer remarked, “If I woulda seen this 2 days ago it coulda saved me 90$ bc I thought my ac crapped out on me.”
The Daily Dot has reached out to the creator via TikTok comment and website form.
The internet is chaotic—but we’ll break it down for you in one daily email. Sign up for the Daily Dot’s web_crawlr newsletter here to get the best (and worst) of the internet straight into your inbox.
