Stop and take a deep breath, what do you smell? If it is fresh, clean air then you may have nothing to worry about and your air systems are working fine. The systems are designed to continuously bring in fresh air and you would notice if they stopped. The air usually dries out if the there is a problem with the filters. You would also see a drastic rise in the number of airborne particles around your home. Either way, you can tell something is wrong and requires fixing. But what you breathe isn't the only problem, since you will also have to deal with the issues you don't see.

Strained Systems

Your air systems have a full time job, pumping in airflow at a constant rate so your home continues smelling fresh and clean. But they do automatically bring in clean air; they bring in air regardless of whether it is clean or not. It is actually up to the air filters in a system to make sure the air coming in is made clean. The tools are made of a weaving that is built for the specific purpose of cleaning up air as it pass through. But the problem with that is that depending on the filters MERV, or Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value, rating they become dirty at a certain rate. Dirty filters are an issue for your entire home and only become worse over time

When a filter is dirty, that means that airflow will have a harder time going through into the system beyond. But that does not mean that the air systems will stop pumping in air, it just means they are going to try harder. This is a big problem for your home billing since this extra effort will begin to draw more power to the air systems. The worse the blockage, the harder the systems will need to push to get airflow through. Even if no air manages to get through, the systems will keep working and you will have to deal with both the lack of fresh air and an increase to energy billing. Luckily there are plenty of ways lower your electric bill, one of the easier ways being replacing old and dirty air filters.

Handling the Problem

Fixing this issue is simple enough you just have to replace the air filters in your systems regularly. You can tell where they are located by looking for through a homeowners manual. You will be able to see where the filters should go and from there you can see what their MERV rating is from the numbers printed on the cardboard edge. Be sure to buy new filters that match the length, width, depth, and MERV rating of the old filters. If the rating is too low, then any number of nasty air particles could fly on through. But if the MERV ratings are too high, then the airflow could still have trouble getting through and you end up with the same problem of strained systems.

Once you figure out what filters you need, just order new ones online. You can install into a system straight out of the box without any complicated instructions. Just fit it in the right way and you are good to go. Make sure to set up a regular replacement schedule so that you do not have to deal with any air problems.