When to service your AC before summer

Everybody in Islamabad services their AC in the same week. It is usually the first genuinely hot week of the year, everybody notices at once, and every technician in the city is booked for a fortnight.

Service it in March. The weather is still mild, you are not competing with half the sector for the same technician, and if something turns out to be broken you have weeks to sort it out rather than sweating through a weekend waiting for a part.

What a proper service actually includes

A service is not a wipe-down. If somebody is at your house for twenty minutes and gone, you have not had one. It should cover:

• The filters, washed and dried properly, not just shaken out.
• The indoor coil, cleaned. This is where the cooling actually happens, and a coil furred up with dust is the single most common reason an AC “is not cooling like it used to”.
• The outdoor unit, washed down. It sits in Islamabad dust for nine months of the year and it has to throw heat away. A blocked outdoor coil makes the compressor work harder, which you pay for on the bill.
• The drain line, flushed. A blocked drain is what makes water run down your wall in July.
• A gas pressure check, so you know whether you need gas — not so you can be sold it.

“It needs gas” is not always true

An AC is a sealed system. It does not consume gas the way a car consumes petrol. If the gas is genuinely low, there is a leak somewhere, and putting more gas in without finding the leak means you will be paying for gas again next year.

So if someone tells you it needs gas, it is fair to ask: what is the pressure reading, and where is it leaking from? A technician who knows what he is doing will have an answer. One who is guessing will not.

Very often the real problem is a dirty coil, a tired capacitor or a fan that is not turning properly — all cheaper than gas, and all things a service should find.

A rough rule for how often

Once a year, before the season, is enough for most homes. Go for twice if:

• your AC runs most of the day through the summer
• you are on a dusty road, or there is construction nearby
• you are in a ground-floor flat where the outdoor unit sits low and collects everything

Before you book anyone

Ask what the service includes and what it costs, and get the number before the technician arrives rather than after he has finished. That is true of us and of anybody else.

Our AC service prices are on the price list, and what is included and what is not is written out on the AC service page.