How To Clean Your AC and Coils Like the Pros Do | WILL Make Air Blow Colder

and the topic of today's video is a very important one because it can save you literally hundreds to thousands of dollars over the long term so in this video I'm going to show you all the tips and tricks and explain things I don't see a lot of people talking about to make sure you get your AC unit as clean as possible and then working as efficiently as possible so let's go ahead and Jump Right In let's go now here is my AC unit it doesn't appear to be super dirty and just because for the most

part we can see through the fins that does not mean that this AC unit does not need cleaned and I think that's one of the most common misconceptions that homeowners have is that they think when they look at their AC unit for the most part it looks clean even though they know they haven't cleaned it in quite some time but it does not take a whole lot of dirt or impediment at all to start clogging up those fins and just because you can't see that they're plugged up and maybe they're not fully plugged up they

can still be affecting how well the AC unit is able to breathe and therefore affect how efficient the AC unit is able to run all right so first thing I want to do before I start working on this a lot of people will say hey I turned off my thermostat so it's not going to run I don't trust that that's not good enough so you should always have some form of Disconnect right next to the AC unit and as you can see there's this handle in here all you got to do is pull it out

and now power is no longer allowed to flow to the AC unit now you can either set this on top or you can flip it upside down and put it back where you pulled it out of and it still won't allow electricity to flow but just to be on on the safe side it's always best to just leave it up on top now since we're going to be dealing with water we want to make sure that this is closed since there is still electricity flowing into a portion of this box now a lot of people

will say you can clean it from the outside and in some cases that is true but there's some disadvantages to just cleaning it from the outside and we'll get into those in just a little bit and on top of that a lot of homeowners don't know how many rows of coils they have do they have one row of coils or do they have two rows of coils and if you got two rows of coils just cleaning it from the outside more than likely you're not going to be able to do a very good job of

getting the inside row of coils cleaned all right so to get to the inside we're going to have to remove all of these screws that go around the top of the AC unit there's probably like 8 to 10 maybe 12 screws in total that need to be removed now for the most part the standard size screw head on these AC units is 516 and that is what this screwdriver has here this is made by Klein it's got a 5/16 driver on it and I really recommend if you don't have one of these I really recommend

picking this up because it just makes the job a whole lot easier and some people argue why don't you just put a 516 driver in an impact and while removing them using the impact is not a bad idea at all when it comes to tightening them back down when we go to put the lid back on I strongly recommend not using an impact or a drill because it is not hard at all to overtighten those screws what will end up happening is it will strip out the metal that that screw is being attached into and

then you won't be able to tighten down the lid as tight and securely as it should be all right now that all those screws are out we can pop our lid up now one thing you want to be careful about when lifting this lid up is you've got some wires and some conduit running down over here so we don't want to put any strain on that and we also want to make sure that we don't damage the fan at all lifting it up and then also setting it down everybody's going to be different for me

personally I'm able to just kind of leave it sitting up like this as long as wind doesn't come along it's not going to fall I don't have anywhere to really rest it but in your case you might be able to rest it somewhere or in some cases you may just have to hold on to it the entire time that you're in here just to make sure that it doesn't come back down so everybody's situation will be a little bit different all right so my AC unit is a perfect example of why you want to clean

it from the inside but as you can see I've got coils connected here and then I've got two rows of fins so if I was to just clean this from the outside this inner row of fins and coils would not receive a whole lot of the cleaner and therefore it wouldn't get as clean as it would need to be and as you can see this is the case all the way around the AC unit so again this is one of those items I don't see a whole lot of people talking about or showing people how

to know whether or not they've got one or two rows of coils the second big advantage to taking the lid off and cleaning it from the inside is you're able to clean out anything that is down in the pan of the AC unit now if your AC unit is one that sits underneath of a tree for instance then the pan of your AC unit is probably going to be a whole lot Fuller than what mine is and if we look down here at the bottom if you see these little holes or what look kind of

like tunnels that you drive through these are holes for draining and if this gets too full then obviously those can get plugged up and your AC unit would not be able to drain out as efficiently as it should so we always want to make sure that these are clear of debris so great way to go about cleaning this is to get a shop vac or a vacuum cleaner that you're able to put a hose down into the bottom of the AC unit and just suck everything out all of the debris leaves any dead insects and

in my case every once in a while I find some dead frogs unfortunately down in the bottom of the pan all right so now we got that all vacuumed out and looking good all of the drainage holes have been unplugged so now let's move on to the next step of cleaning this so in order to clean the coils you're going to need some sort of coil cleaner but I really recommend using this coil cleaner here I found it to work incredibly well and of course I'll have links down in the description for this and everything

else in the video and I also have some links for some other coil cleaners I found to work well in the past but for me personally I found this one to work the best and it's at a decent price now because of the chemical nature of this cleaner you're going to want a couple things you're going to want some rubber gloves and order to protect your hands and probably more than anything I suggest a good pair of safety glasses because as this cleaner hits those fins you never know what direction it's going to shoot back

in and sometimes it can be your face and your eyes so the way I like to disperse my coil cleaner is I like to just go side to side and you also want to make sure of what direction the fins are going in sometimes they can be just going in One Direction and you want to make sure that you're spraying it at an angle that's going to get in between all those fins so I just spray this side to side working my way from top to bottom or bottom to top it really doesn't matter which

Direction you start in but just going side to side making sure that I'm getting all of the coils underneath of the fins to make sure that they're also getting clean it's not just the fins are getting clean but the coils inside of the fins as well and of course there's four sides to an air conditioning unit I just work on one side at a time making sure that I'm concentrating the spray just on that one section I'm working on it doesn't have to be perfect you don't have to fully coat it it's not like paint

where maybe you have to coat it twice as long as you've sprayed the area and you've gone over it once or maybe you overlap a little bit that's plenty the idea is getting this as clean as possible and anything that you do is going to make it cleaner than it was before to help it run more efficiently and one can is typically always enough for me to do the insides and also allow for me to do the outside and this is important for me since I have those two sets of coils not only am I

getting the inside set of coils I want to make sure that I'm also getting this outer side of coils as well because the argument would be made if it's not good enough to spray it from the outside with two sets of coils then it also wouldn't be good enough to just spray it from the inside with two sets of coils as the cleaner is not able to get to the outside portion so it's the same thing I just go side to side working my way from top to bottom bottom to top all right so now

all of the Interior coils and all of the coils on the exterior have now all been sprayed so now we want to give it a little bit of time for that coil cleaner to do its job I usually give it about 5 to eight minutes and then come back all right so we've given the coil cleaner plenty of time to just sit and do its job now we want to rinse it all down and I typically rinse it down by using one of these Garden sprayers and I set it to the shower mode the reason

I set it to the shower setting is because it puts out quite a bit of water but it doesn't put it out at a lot of force not that this garden sprayer puts out anything underneath a lot of pressure but we want to do everything we can not to damage the fins or bend them in any way because if you bend the fins then it can also lead to decreased efficiency so just like I did with the cleaner I'll do the same thing with the garden sprayer I'll just go back and forth working my way

up and down and just making sure that everything is getting sprayed out of both sides and as I go back and forth with this you can literally see the difference as it just washes it away all that Grime and dirt mold and mildew that's been building up over the year or years and rinsing it as you're going side to side and going up and down it's just one of those oddly satisfying things seeing how much clean cleaner it is all right so now all the interior and exterior coils are clean now what I like to

do you see all of those Suds down in the pan of the AC unit this is where I do turn the garden sprayer to a little higher of a pressure setting and I just spray out the bottom because that residue that's in that water it still has some of that cleaner in it this is a great opportunity to go ahead and clean up the pan it won't get it as clean as if you were going to pressure wash it but it definitely makes it a whole lot cleaner and you're also doing the job of getting

all that residual cleaner out of the pan of the AC unit all right so now at this point I can put my lid back on and I want to make sure that that lid is overlapping everything around the exterior of all of my walls of the AC unit and then once I've got the lid down in place that's when I'll just put all of my screws back in that I took out at the very beginning and again I want to make sure that I'm using a screwdriver to tighten these down so I'm just hand tightening

them and not allowing a drill or an impact to overtighten and possibly strip them out and so now that I'm done working on the inside of the AC at this point I can reconnect the power to my AC unit and what great results we have gotten from cleaning this I can clearly see those coils through those fins and they're just shining and as you saw super easy to do didn't take very long to do it just about anybody can do this themselves so save yourself some money in the short term by allowing this to run

more efficiently so it doesn't have to run as long saving you money on your utility bill and also doing it yourself not having to hire somebody out to do something as easy as this and also save yourself some money in the long term by doing this on a regular basis so that it allows your unit to last longer without having to be repaired or replaced now if you'd like some more tips and tricks on how to make your AC and heat pump run better I'll post a link to a video right up here that will

show you exactly how to do that so I hope that you found this video to be helpful if you did if you could do me a huge favor hit that thumbs up button right down below and of course if you have any questions or comments you leave those down in the comment section and I'll catch you all in in the next one see you