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Do Air Conditioners Help With Air Quality?

Outdoor AC unit in Hicksville, NY home.

Living in a home with poor air quality will do nothing but bring you misery, and no one wants to live in a house filled with pet dander and dust mites. Besides your windows, your AC is the main source of air filtration throughout your home, so you might be wondering if your air conditioner helps with air quality. In order to know if your AC can bring you clean indoor air, it’s important to understand the air cooling process and the ways you can help make this process more efficient. 

The Role of an Air Conditioner

Your AC is capable of many things, and simply cooling your home makes it a valuable machine. To know if air conditioners help with air quality, it’s important to understand exactly what it’s capable of doing by breaking down how your home is cooled. 

Essentially, your air conditioner sucks in hot air and pushes out cool air, creating a steady flow of air to keep the cycle going. Refrigerant is used to absorb heat, transforming from a liquid to a gas as it carries the hot air to the compressor. As the heart of the air conditioning system, the compressor is responsible for converting the refrigerant into a high-temperature, high-pressure gas. The refrigerant then travels to the condenser, where the outside air absorbs the heat from gas, and cold condenser coils transform the refrigerant back into its liquid state. Then, the cooling cycle starts all over again.

Does My Air Conditioner Help With Air Quality?

Air conditioners themselves aren’t designed to improve air quality — but the air filter does catch dust and other airborne contaminants as the air flows through the many parts of your HVAC system. 

A common myth homeowners have is that air conditioners bring in outdoor air and cool it, thus circulating fresh air into your home. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. The condenser only exposes the refrigerant to warm outside air as a means of depositing heat from the air in your home. So while your AC doesn’t bring in fresh air, it can still help trap dust and other debris in the air filter.

How to Improve Indoor Air Quality

So if your AC won’t help, how can you improve indoor air quality in your home? Start by taking care of your air conditioner — like getting maintenance services done — to ensure excellent long-term air quality.

Clean Up the Air

You can’t get good air quality if you don’t care for the air in your home. If your air is filled with allergens and dust, it’s never a bad idea to open a few windows and get some fresh air. Indoor plants can help, as can air purifiers and air cleaners. And of course, don’t forget to clean up your home. Remove dust and particles, clean up pet litter and waste, and make sure you don’t go too long between cleans. 

Change Air Filters

Many homeowners forget to change their air filters on a regular basis, which plays a huge part in their air quality and the effectiveness of their air conditioners. Changing your air filter keeps dust and debris from sneaking into your home and protects your AC from overheating. It’s best to change out air filters every three months or even sooner in hot weather. 

Get an Efficient Air Conditioner

To ensure your air quality stays pristine, you must have a long period in which air is allowed to circulate through your home. A high-efficiency AC can help keep air moving through your home by resting at low speeds and processing air at high speeds more efficiently. Consider getting a high SEER-rated air conditioner (16 and up) to help stimulate purified air throughout your home.

Get Proper Maintenance for Your Air Conditioning System

If you were wondering how to improve indoor air quality, your first thought should’ve been getting maintenance on your unit. Your AC can trap dust in the coils, and outside dust and debris are always in contact with the condenser. If you don’t get your air ducts cleaned out, all of your attempts to clean your home will be undone as soon as your system starts back up. Maintenance from a good AC company will ensure that your air conditioner continues processing clean air.

Breathe in High-Quality Air With Help From the Experts

As you can see, improving the air quality of your home is mostly up to you, but you don’t have to do it alone. With a professional HVAC company, AC maintenance tune-ups are made easy, and you can keep your air ducts and those hard-to-reach places clean. It’s not hard to keep your home’s air quality up to par — all you have to do is reach out to the experts at Gold Star. We service residents in Long Islands and beyond!

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