How Often Should You Change Your Air Filters?

To ensure that your family is safe from germs and other potentially harmful air particles, you should replace the air filter more often.

Families with children

should change their filters every 60 to 90 days, while those with pets should increase the frequency to every 60 days for one pet and every 30 for two. The only way to be sure how often the air filter needs to be changed is to perform a visual inspection of the filter every month. After a few months, you'll get an idea of how quickly it gets dirty. You'll need to re-evaluate if you're going to have a new pet or if the outside air quality has been poor.

Generally, most air filter manufacturers and HVAC companies recommend changing the air filter every 90 days or 3 months. This may change depending on the location of your home (e.g. dusty and dry climates), if you have pets, and the age of your system and equipment. If you have pets at home, you should consider changing the filter every 60 days or 2 months, and in the case of households with several pets or people with allergies or respiratory conditions, we recommend that you change the filter every 20 to 45 days. Usually, vacation homes or empty houses that aren't used much can wait to change filters every 9 to 12 months.

The general consensus is that the more you use your home, the more you'll need to change your air filter. The basic consensus among HVAC professionals is that you should replace your furnace filter every 90 days or every three months. However, this may vary depending on the thickness of the filter. Thicker filters have more room to collect dirt and dust, so they don't need to be changed as often. Thomas & Galbraith Heating, Cooling and Plumbing of Ohio recommends replacing filters that are less than 2 inches thick every 30 to 90 days.

Three- or 4-inch filters can last 6 to 9 months, and filters up to 6 inches thick can be replaced once a year. You should change your filters more frequently if you have allergies or asthma. Respiratory problems make you much more sensitive to particles in the air, so you should change your air filter every six weeks to ensure that your indoor air quality is at its best. As a general rule, it is recommended to change HVAC equipment (we are talking about furnace filters, air filters, oven filters, etc.) Outdoor air quality can have a big impact on how often the air filter gets dirty and needs to be replaced. City dwellers who face smog and air pollution should change filters more often than those who live in rural areas without air quality problems. So how do you determine if your air filter has trapped more than enough dirt and requires a change? If the dirty air filter is completely covered with dust and dirt, it's a good idea to replace it even if it hasn't reached the end of its recommended lifespan.

Larger homes have large volumes of air circulating everywhere, which means that the filter may need to be changed more frequently. To get the best performance and optimal efficiency from your air conditioning system, replace filters every 30 to 45 days. You can hear it now: Your HVAC technician is giving you lessons on how to make sure you change your air filter. Connecting the filter change to the energy bill makes sense because clean filters improve the efficiency of the air conditioning system and reduce the electricity bill. Crop harvesting can increase the amount of dust, pollen, or agricultural debris in the air and may require filters to be changed more frequently during certain seasons. For most people, the difficult part of changing the air filter is determining what type of replacement it should receive.

The short answer is that, according to most air filter manufacturers and HVAC companies, you should change your air filter every 30 days when using less expensive fiberglass filters.

Deanne Capetillo
Deanne Capetillo

Incurable music evangelist. Incurable coffee geek. Hipster-friendly food scholar. Certified pop cultureaholic. Friendly coffee junkie.

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