Every home that has an HVAC system needs air filters, it’s practically a given. As their name suggests, air filters filter out the air that enters and circulates around your home, leaving you and your family with cleaner air to breathe. Just like car filters, these home air filters also need to be changed out every 3 months (or more frequently if you have pets or asthmatic family members). But what happens when you don’t change them out for months on end?

1. Frozen Coils
The lack of airflow to the cooling coils or the evaporator can be caused by the air filter being too congested, which can happen during the summer cooling season. This, in turn, causes condensation to freeze and your coils and fans to have frost buildup, which can make it a lot more difficult for your air cooling unit to work by removing heat from air and cooling your home. If unresolved and kept as is for a long time, your air conditioning unit may even break down.

2. Mildew, Mold, and Bacteria Growth
A clogged air filter could also cause the evaporator coil in air conditioning or heat pump systems to get covered in mold, bacteria, or dirt. When this happens, the critical heat exchange process is constrained, which gives your A/C or heat pump a hard time in effectively controlling indoor climate or removing ample amounts of humidity in the air. It also turns the evaporator coil into a sort of petri dish where microorganisms can multiply.

3. Poor Air Quality
As its name stipulates, air filters filter out unwanted particles and bacteria from the air that you breathe in. Hence, if your system’s air filters are dirty and unchanged for months, you can bet that the air that you’re breathing in is dirty, too. Worse, a blocked air filter continuously re-circulates the particles that it normally should keep out of the indoor air, causing you and your family members to experience any number of symptoms including fatigue, allergies, and headaches. 

4. Higher Energy Bills
Your entire home’s central air conditioning system depends on the continuous re-circulation of air, so when that circulation is disrupted by a clogged or dirty air filter, you can expect your system to struggle just to continue cooling your house as normal. The harder the system works, the more energy it requires – which ultimately means higher energy bills, as well. In other words, you’ll be getting less air for the value that you normally would pay for clean air in the home.

5. Furnace Failure
The worst scenario to your home’s HVAC system when you fail to change your dirty air filters would be to have it all stop working altogether. When you compare the price of having to repair or even replace your entire HVAC to the price of changing air filters every couple of months or so, the decision should be fairly obvious. FilterBuy's air filter sizes can even be ordered online and delivered to your home, which eliminates the need to head out to buy them.

Changing air filters in your home’s AC and ventilation system literally takes minutes. So the next time you feel the need to put off removing your dirty air filters, think of what it would do to both your HVAC system and your family’s health.