HVAC maintenance has received increasing attention in the HVAC industry over the last decade. The industry aims to educate Santa Rosa, CA property owners about the necessity of routine maintenance for their HVAC systems. Use this guide to compare the cost of annual maintenance versus the savings you can expect as a result.
Annual Cost of HVAC Maintenance
To begin, let’s explore the costs of professional HVAC maintenance. The average cost for HVAC maintenance is around $250 per visit, or about $500 annually. Individual homes may range higher or lower depending on the system size, system type, location, etc. Some companies offer a maintenance agreement that may reduce the annual cost of each visit, give you a service discount, and provide priority scheduling.
HVAC maintenance is an expansive set of tasks that aim to test and tune your home’s system, maintaining its operational efficiency. This typically includes:
- Testing the thermostat and checking settings
- Checking and tightening mounting hardware
- Inspecting and tightening electrical connections
- Individual component testing
- Lubricating unsealed moving parts
- Cleaning condensate drain
- Cleaning the circulating fan wheel
- Cleaning the heat exchanger
- Cleaning the evaporator coils
- Testing refrigerant levels
9 Ways Maintenance Saves Money
While the cost of HVAC maintenance is immediate, the savings may not always be readily apparent. Consider the following nine ways routine HVAC maintenance can save you money:
1. Reduced Energy Consumption
Regardless of the kind of system you have, scheduling annual maintenance helps reduce the energy consumed while heating or cooling your home. Without annual maintenance, your system will slowly lose its efficiency, causing longer heating and cooling cycles and consuming more energy. If you only see consumption variations that proportionally correspond to changes in temperature, you know your system’s efficiency is remaining constant.
2. Fewer Repairs
Every mechanical system will break down and need parts repaired or replaced. Protecting your system’s efficiency reduces the strain on the system while it’s heating and cooling your home. This results in less wear and tear. Further, the testing that’s conducted with maintenance aims to identify small problems before there are issues affecting the function of the system. Left neglected, these small problems add substantial wear to the entire system, causing additional components to need replacing sooner.
3. Reduced Risk of Emergency Calls
HVAC systems experience the most strain when temperatures are at their most extreme in the summer and winter. The additional strain of the environmental temperature pushes many systems into failure when they are already strained. This is because of restricted airflow or components operating suboptimally. This results in an emergency call, such as after hours or over the weekend. Emergency call rates can run double or more than normal service because of the extra cost of labor during these times. You reduce the strain your system experiences by catching smaller problems early, enabling it to more readily handle extreme temperatures.
4. Reduced Costs for Covered Repair
New HVAC systems come with a factory warranty to cover premature equipment failures. Most of these warranties have terms you must meet to keep them valid. One of those terms is a requirement for routine maintenance. Most warranties also state that a qualified professional must perform all system services. Attempting to perform maintenance yourself may also negate the warranty. Investing in annual maintenance can save you a lot of money over the term of the warranty between reduced wear and the cost of parts.
5. Healthier Indoor Air
Because of the cleaning of interior components that a technician performs during routine maintenance, there are fewer particles circulating back into your home. These particles can range from dust and dirt to bacteria, viruses and biological spores. Higher concentrations of particulate matter in your home’s air can cause respiratory irritation and upper airway infections. By deep cleaning the system, you reduce the risk of these ailments.
6. Less Dust Throughout Your Home
Dust is something that all homes experience, but the amount of dust varies from one house to another. When you neglect HVAC maintenance, you allow more particles to continue circulating through the air. The particles eventually collect on surfaces around your home. This increases the frequency of dusting you’ll need to do and the cleaning products that come with it. However, dust also adds wear to everything around your home, from furniture and cabinets to clothes, linens and even electronics. By scheduling routine maintenance and reducing the particles inside your system, you help protect everything around your home.
7. Improved HVAC Safety
It’s easy to forget that HVAC systems have inherent risks, such as toxic gas leaks, fire hazards, and risks of electrical shock. All these risks are mitigated when a system is installed and maintained properly. At the high end, mitigating these risks saves money by avoiding an incident. However, dig deeper, and you’ll find costs from an incident could include personal liability and loss of insurance coverage. This is the case if your insurance company can prove neglect caused the loss. Failing to invest even a few hundred dollars annually could end up costing you thousands of dollars in the event of a major incident.
8. Reduced Annualized Replacement Cost
Your average air conditioner or heat pump should last 10 to 15 years with a gas furnace lasting 15 to 20 years. Aside from age, you know it’s time to replace the system when any single repair is more than 50% of the cost of replacing the unit. This is also the case when the sum of repairs over the prior two years multiplied by the system’s age is more than the cost of a new system. With the wear that comes with ongoing neglect, you can lose several years from the expected service life of your equipment. This begins to significantly increase the annualized cost of the system, resulting in as much as a 30% increase if the service life is reduced by even 2 years.
9. Fewer Concessions When Selling Your Home
When it’s time to sell your home, you want to reduce the issues that can create obstacles in the closing process. One factor that potential buyers consider is any major repairs they can expect within the first few years of buying a home. An HVAC system that’s dirty and looks neglected may cause some buyers to hesitate on making an offer, submit a reduced offer or ask for concessions like having the system replaced. Investing a few thousand dollars in maintenance over the life of your HVAC system can prevent these costly headaches when trying to sell your home.
KC Home Services has kept families and homes around Santa Rosa safe and comfortable since 1988. Local businesses and property owners turn to us for dependable air conditioning and heating maintenance, installation and repair and indoor air quality solutions. We also offer a wide range of plumbing services including repairs, drain cleaning, camera inspections and water heater installation and repair. Call to schedule your fall or spring HVAC maintenance visit with one of our experienced technicians today.
