How Often Should I Clean My Filters?

So, you just got a new heatpump. At first you played with all the buttons on the remote, adjusted the temperature until you found one that was just right. Fast forward to three years later and you realize that its so low maintenance and does such a good job at maintaining the temperature, you haven’t touched it in months… or dare I say… years! But it’s working great, humming along quietly, keeping your family comfortable year round. What’s the harm in just letting it be?

Something that many people don’t realize is that there are filters inside your heatpump. Faithfully doing their job filtering the air in your home, day in and day out. But what happens to most filters? Over time, they get dirty. So, can you clean them? Definitely! Should you clean them? That is a resounding YES!! PLEASE clean them regularly!

In this post we’ll discuss why you should clean them and how often you should do so. Check out our other blog/vlog for a quick tutorial on how to clean them if you aren’t sure how.

So first, why clean them? As the air in your home passes through the filters, the stuff in your air clogs up the filters. What “stuff” am I talking about? Dust, animal fur, cooking grease, etc. Over time, the air coming out of your heatpump might not smell as clean and pure as it should because it’s passing through all these old stale items. Yuck. So for your own health, cleaning them is very important! Also, when the air can’t pass through easily, the machine has to work harder, putting more stress on your heatpump. For the best performance and to make it last as long as possible, please clean your filters regularly!

Okay, so I keep using the word “regularly” but does that mean once a year? Once a month? Every day?? At this point you might be wondering “How often should I clean them??” Although EVERYONE should be cleaning their filters, how often you clean them depends on many different factors. How often do you use your heatpump? Ours is a new high efficiency Mitsubishi, so it runs until extremely low temperatures. And we have a lot of big windows in our home with direct sunlight, so in the summer, the A/C runs pretty often. So in our situation, the heatpump is running ALL. THE. TIME. We pretty much never turn it off. We just put it to a comfortable temperature and let it do its thing. But when it’s running so often, air is constantly going through those filters and so they need to be cleaned quite often. Whereas someone else might only use theirs in the summer on those really really hot days. I know one elderly couple that keeps their home at 27 degrees celcius in the summer. Yes, you read that right. Their heatpump is set to 27. My husband would die if I ever did that, like literally he would be a melted blob on the floor, but everyone is different. So anyways, that couple only turns their air conditioning on a few days of the year. In that example, their filters would not need to be cleaned nearly as often as ours.

Another scenario would be someone that has a couple of cats that shed a lot. This would contribute to more debris in the air, meaning they should clean their filters more often. Or maybe there’s a smoker in the home, once again, more reason to clean your filters often. Those are just a few examples of contributing factors, but I think you can see that every home is a little bit different, so you would have to look at your own circumstances and ask yourself questions like: How often does my heatpump get used? Do I have pets, smokers, or other factors that would cause my filters to get clogged up? So in our home, we don’t smoke, we do have a dog, but he barely sheds, and we’re only three people living here. But on the other hand, we do cook a lot, lately the baby and I are home allllll the time, and the heatpump is on 24/7. So we clean our filters every few months. Others who rarely use their heatpump would be fine with cleaning the filters maybe once a year. So although this article won’t tell you specifically how often you personally need to clean your filters, it can hopefully give you a ballpark idea of how often it should be done; anywhere from once a month to once a year.

So next time you feel like your heatpump isn’t as efficient as it once was, please open it up and take a look at those filters! You just may realize they’ve been neglected. Keep in mind that even with your filters being cleaned regularly, getting your machine deep cleaned by a professional is also recommended. As you may have guessed, how often to get that done varies, but on average it should be done every 3-4 years. I’ll be going into further detail about general machine maintenance soon, so stay posted for that!