How healthy is the drinking water in your home? Is the air in your home healthy?
In order to maintain a healthy home, its important to keep up with periodic home maintenance tasks that often go overlooked like changing your water and air filters periodically. If you don’t change your drinking water filters, built up toxins, bacteria, and viruses may make their way into your glass of drinking water. If you don’t change your air filters, you may be breathing unhealthy air that includes dust, allergens, and other unhealthy substances. The mechanical systems in an HVAC unit can also become overloaded and wear out prematurely or break down completely.
Here is some general information on your home’s water filtration and HVAC systems that require periodic maintenance and information on how to go about maintaining them.
Water Purifier / Refrigerator Filter / Reverse Osmosis System Filters
Home water filtration systems vary in design, effectiveness, and the amount of VOC’s, toxins, bacteria, viruses, etc. that they remove from your drinking water. These systems include pitchers, point of use styles that attach onto an existing faucet, above and below counter top water filters and water purifiers, reverse osmosis systems, and whole house water filtration systems. The filters in all of these systems need to be changed periodically per the manufacturers recommendation to avoid buildup of bacteria, toxins, and other unhealthy substances. It is at that point that the filter can no longer perform its intended function.
It may actually be more unhealthy to use some form of water filtration system without changing the filters than it would be to not have one at all. All that needs to be done is to change your filters when recommended to do so by the manufacturer. You can find much of this info online using the make and model of your system. You can also find this in the original documentation that came with it, assuming you kept that information. Box stores like Home Depot or Lowes carry some of these filters but if they are older systems, online may be your best bet.
Heater / Air Conditioning / Whole House Filters
HVAC system filters trap pollutants as the air passes across the filter. These pollutants can include dust, animal dander, dust mites, molds, bacteria and viruses, etc. These pollutants can be bad for your health and lower your quality of life when you breath them, especially for people with asthma or allergy sufferers. They can also impede your HVAC system’s ability to function properly over time by clogging the mechanical functions of the unit.
Depending on the pollutant levels in your home, these filters may need to be changed anywhere from monthly to every few months. Lower end filters do a decent job of removing these airborne substances and the higher end filters will remove many more pollutants that may be in the air you breathe.
Changing these filters is usually easier than water filters since they will often have the size listed right on the filter, assuming you have good access to the HVAC unit. Some units are located in tight spaces including basements and crawlspaces. The numbers for these filters are usually listed as a size such as 16x20x1 meaning the filter size is 16″ x 20″ and is 1″ thick. To pull out the old filter, there are usually two latches that you pull or unlatch to access the filter enclosure cover. Sometimes you’ll have to remove 2 or 4 screws instead.
The newer mini-split wall mounted air conditioning units usually have a washable plastic filter that is pretty easy to pull out and clean. The digital readout will usually let you know when its time to change the filter.
Contact Me for a Free Quote
There are new systems coming out everyday so these are just a handful of the most common ones out there. If you have any questions on a specific water filtration system or an HVAC system in Los Gatos, CA that is not covered in this blog, please reach out to me at (408) 314-7645 or submit a free quote request on my website. I’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have.
