The air conditioner, A/C does a wonderful job to provide relief in soaring heat of the day. Nowadays most households use it and many households have more than one A/C. Especially with young kids at home, we use the A/C to put them to sleep. We bought the split A/C when our first kid was born; had excellent cooling effect and did not have problems for couple of months.
We live in a quite neighborhood away from hustle and bustle of vehicle traffic. Nevertheless, we are just 5 driving minutes away from the city main road where the vehicular traffic never comes to end. Naturally, we thought, since we live away from main road, the amount of dust in home is almost non-existent. How far the dust can travel from the main road or even from far off location? It seems very unlikely! However, we were proven wrong! Read on to know how we found out.
Especially living in the city, the dust is a chronic problem. The microscopic dust can create allergies in young kids, and seriously we did not want our kids to get allergic to dust due to constant exposure. Long term exposure to allergens may lead to Asthma! That is when we decided to install A/C in our bedroom since young kids i.e. below 3 years, spend most of their time sleeping and playing. Moreover, cooling systems can also control humidity in a room that can limit growth of microscopic germs that thrive in certain humidity levels. So the cooling system takes care of two things. First, prevent dust from outside and, second, limit the growth of other microscopic organisms in the room.
Day by day, the cooling effect of the A/C was reducing and our kids were finding it difficult to sleep as they have used to certain temperature (24C) while sleeping. We do not use A/C in our living room and our kids are comfortable in room temperature when they are awake. I live in Indonesia and day temperature can soar up to 30C i.e. 90F. We called in an A/C service guy and asked him to check why our A/C unit is not cooling as it should be. We use split A/C i.e. there are two separate units: one unit is fixed inside the bedroom and other is outside the room.
The service man opened the filter case of the indoor unit and he showed us the amount of dust, heavy black color, in the filter. We were taken aback! The dust was undermining the performance of our A/C. The A/C was stressed to pump cooled air through blocked filter and consuming more power! On one hand, we were not getting our room cooled at the desired temperature. On the other hand, the A/C is consuming more power.
We found out there are two reasons for A/C to work below optimum levels,
1. Dust is blocking the air circulation system
2. Freon, the coolant, for the A/C is not enough
I am no expert on A/C system, however, the reasoning made by our service guy made sense to me.
We were curious to see how the A/C was cleaned. Basically, the A/C units are cleaned using pressurized spray of water through a micro nozzle. When he started to clean both units, we are astounded to see the amount of dust carried away by the water. The cleaning water turned almost black!
After the cleaning the A/C system, it was less noisy and cooler!
The fact is that, we should get our A/C cleaned at least once in three months to keep them at the optimum levels of operation. Further, do not assume that if something is not visible means it does not exists. This is very much true for dust. Dust particles are so small they fly through the air even for kilometers before settling. The amount of dust you can find in your home is astounding. Unless completely enclosed home, your living place is the safe heaven for dust to settle. Moreover, dust can sneak in from tiny openings even through gaps of closed doors and windows. Notice that dust is one of the main reasons for allergy in children.
In summary, keep your living space free of dust by using dust filters wherever possible in your home. The dust causes nasty problems that we are least aware of. Remember that prevention is better than cure. So act today and see how to make your den safe place to live for you and your family.
