Home Furnace filters and properly heating up your home
Local

Furnace filters and properly heating up your home

Contributors

Furnace filtersWhen you are laying back, enjoying the heated air coming from a vent, do you ever wonder how it comes in so clean? It doesn’t have to be clean, it could contain all the little allergens and pollutants floating around outside of your home. The furnace system has no real way to discern the clean air from the dirty, it just brings in whatever it can to be heated and distributed. This is where your furnace filters come in. The tools are used in order to lean up incoming airflow and ensure that its quality is increased before you breathe it. These air filters never stop working from the moment they are installed to the time you swap them out for fresher ones However, in that time the filters become dirtier and dirtier to a point where they cause issues for your home.

Furnace Filters and Their Important Duty

The furnace filters in a system are rated based on the MERV rating system that tells you just how effective they are. All filters clean up airflow, that’s their purpose, and they do so by trapping and absorbing irritants in a tight mesh weaving. The MERV rating tells you how tight this weaving is, and thus how many particles the filter is capable of blocking out of the air. But while it may seem like you want the highest MERV rating possible for your furnace, that may actually cause more issues than its worth. Tighter air filters make it more difficult for air to travel through into the system behind. This is already a decently sized problem for normal air systems, but for furnaces it becomes a larger issue.

When the airflow for a furnace becomes blocked, then the heated air begins to build up and temperatures start to rise. You do not want the temperatures inside of your furnace to get too high or else the system may become damaged over time. The air needs to flow through smoothly, which means that the mesh weaving should not be tight enough to stop the air. You should also make sure that the filter is not so dirty that it begins to block airflow either. Otherwise, the same issues may occur and you will have to pay for the damages that occur.

Furnace Filter Swapping

When you need new air filters for a system, all you need to do is order the 16x25x1 air filters from a preferred provider in the correct size. The size you need is often detailed in the owner’s manual of your furnace system. If that fails, then you can simply read the filter size off of the old filter’s cardboard edge. After that, the filters will arrive ready for use whenever you need. Be sure to note how often your furnace filters need swapping in order to avoid any problems with airflow and keep the air in your home fresh and clean.

Contributors

Contributors

Have a guest column, letter to the editor, story idea or a news tip? Email editor Chris Graham at [email protected]. Subscribe to AFP podcasts on Apple PodcastsSpotifyPandora and YouTube.