How To Clean And Straighten Your Evaporator Coils

The heat pump is perhaps the most important component in a central HVAC system. It is vital to the normal functioning and efficiency of both your heating and air conditioning. It is located on the outside of your house, making it more vulnerable to wear and tear. Most significantly, the evaporator coils on the outside of your pump are likely to get dirty and bent over time. But, they can be quite easily cleaned and fixed even if you don't have any sort of experience working on HVAC systems. This article explains the best way to straighten and clean evaporator coils on a heat pump.

Cleaning Your Coils

It is a good idea to start by spraying down your coils with some water. This should knock away most of the loose dirt and allow you to use a coil straightening brush. A coil straightening brush is basically a wire brush that allows you to clean within the coils without damaging or flattening them. However, you need to make sure that you always brush with the grain of the coil grows. If you brush against the grain, you could flatten the coils and make the problem even worse.

But, even a coil cleaning brush might not get the job done if there is dirt stuck deep between the individual rows. This is why it is usually helpful to spray down your coils with an evaporator coil cleaning liquid. This is a foaming liquid that will break down the dirt and separate it from the metal coils. Then, you can wash out the loose dirt with hose before getting the brush back out and cleaning away all of the leftover residue.

Basically, the job involves switching back and forth between the various tools and techniques. There is really no right or wrong order of operations, you just want to make sure that your coils end up as clean and straight as possible.

The difficulty of the jobs usually depends on how long it has been since you last cleaned or straightened your coil. If you do it every year, the job will take a matter of minutes. In fact, you might be able to completely clean out your coils with just some water. However, if you haven't cleaned your evaporator coils and a couple of years, the dirt is going to be stubbornly stuck to the metal and much harder to remove. So, you should consider clean your coils at least once a year.

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