Air con cleaning in North Brisbane

What a bag clean actually is

A catch bag goes up under the indoor unit and the head comes off the wall. Then the parts that matter get chemically washed and flushed out: the evaporator coil, the barrel fan, the drain tray and the drain itself. The water that comes out is usually enough to convince anyone the job was needed.

That is a different job to what most people mean by “servicing”. Pulling the filters out and hosing them off takes five minutes and does help — but the filters are the first thing the air hits, not the last. Everything that gets past them lands on a wet coil in a dark box, which is precisely the place mould likes.

So if the unit smells, or someone in the house has started sneezing when it runs, or you can see black speckling on the vanes at the front, the filters are not where the problem is.

What else we check while it’s apart

The pressure test is the useful one. A unit that is slowly losing refrigerant cools a bit worse each summer, and most people put that down to it getting old. Testing while we are there means you find out now, when it is a repair, rather than in January when it is an emergency.

We also check the drain runs away properly — blocked drains are where the “it’s dripping on the carpet” jobs come from — and that the electricals at the isolator and the outdoor unit are sound. Both of us are licensed electricians, so if there is something wrong at that end it gets fixed rather than noted.

When to book it

Autumn or early spring, before you need it. A clean in the middle of a heatwave is a clean you have been waiting three weeks for, because that is when everyone calls. The units we clean in September are the ones that work properly in December.

Once a year suits most houses. Twice for rentals, offices, anything running all day, and places with pets or near the water.

Rentals and offices

If you manage properties, a clean between tenancies is the cheapest way to avoid the mould complaint that turns into a maintenance request. You get photos and notes on each unit, and they all go on the one invoice with your work order reference on it — same as everything else we do for property managers.

Multiple units at the same address are cheaper per unit, because the setup is the expensive bit and we only do it once.