Video: 5 Ways to Prepare Your HVAC System for Winter

PLEASANTON — Sarah Rutan: As winter draws near, you’ll want to make sure your HVAC system is equipped for optimal performance. Today we’re in Pleasanton with Diamond Certified Expert Contributor Kevin Comerford of Service Champions to learn five worthwhile steps.

Diamond Certified Expert Contributor, Kevin Comerford: Hello. These are the five things a homeowner can do in order to get their heating and air conditioning system prepared for the cold of winter. The first item is changing your filter. Your system has probably been running all summer long and operating pretty intensely throughout the heat of summer. Now that you’re transitioning to wintertime it’s time to take a look and see if your filter needs to be changed. The dirt that gets sucked into your furnace and air conditioning system oftentimes is the No. 1 thing that caused these to break down. Having a dirty filter also makes your system a lot more inefficient.

The second thing a homeowner can do to prepare their system for winter is make sure that you turn your furnace on at least three times while it’s still mild outside. The last thing you want is to turn your furnace on for the first time when it’s really, really cold and see that it doesn’t operate or is not working. A lot of times these furnaces, because they haven’t been used a lot, will have things going on inside of them like a squirrel can get down into the flue pipe or there’s a lot of different things that can cause your furnace to not operate properly. You want to find that out early in the season while it’s still mild before it gets cold.

The third thing a homeowner can do is a visual inspection around the furnace. That means your furnace may be located in the garage, it may be in a closet, or it may be up in the attic. Now the attic may be a little bit more difficult to get to because you’ve got to climb up on a ladder, so we don’t recommend that necessarily, but certainly if your furnace is inside your garage or in a closet, make sure that anything that could be stored around the furnace is removed. We don’t want anything to be draped over the furnace or anything lying around it because that could be a fire hazard. Also, these furnaces need to breathe, and if there’s a lot of stuff that’s on top of them it’ll cause them to break down and they won’t operate properly.

The fourth thing a homeowner can do to prepare their heating and air condition system for the winter is to make sure that you have a programmable thermostat and make sure the program is actually working. What that means is you can program your thermostat if you want it to come on in the morning about 30 minutes before you wake up so that your home is nice and warm when you wake up. You also can have it programmed to shut off when you leave in the morning and then come back on 30 minutes before you arrive and then shut off at night if you like it cool in the evening. There’s all these different features that are available on a programmable thermostat, so make sure you read your manual or call a service provider who certainly can help you get that set up.

The fifth and final thing a homeowner can do to prepare their heating system for the wintertime is make sure that you have regular maintenance done at least one time per year. The furnace emits carbon monoxide. It also has natural gas that’s used to power it. These are two volatile elements that we don’t recommend most homeowners even mess around with. Your furnace has a flame inside of it. You want to have that looked at every year by a service provider to make sure that it’s operating safely, make sure it’s clean because the cleaning of the unit will also make sure that it runs properly and is super efficient. Thank you very much.

Host, Sarah Rutan: To learn more from local, top rated companies, visit our Diamond Certified Expert Reports at experts.diamondcertified.org.