Improving Air Conditioner Efficiency

Temperatures are starting to heat up and everybody's getting itchy to hit the campgrounds, get out on the road, and go camping. One of the things you should do every year in the spring is spend a little bit of time doing some maintenance and checking your RV air conditioner. We get a lot of questions on this. Sometimes people wait until it gets really the heat of the summertime, and then it's hot to get up on the roof and to basically maintain this unit. So when you bring it out from the spring, it's a good time to take a little bit of time and just go over a few things. First thing is airflow. Now, this is a typical rooftop unit that you would see. This happens to be a Coleman, there's Dometic, a variety of other ones. A lot of them, in your travel trailers, on the inside you will have a direct flow. So you will have a plate, basically like this, up on the ceiling, with your knobs in here. If you have a ducted roof air, you will have an air return. It's a warm air return in here and your thermostat will basically run your air conditioner. But both of these have filters. So if you take this off, I'm gonna turn it over for better access, you will have a very thin, mesh-like filter, like this. It'll either be sitting in these grooves, two of 'em here, as the air comes through, or in your cold air return on the ceiling. But both of 'em will have a filter. Every spring you need to take that out, and maybe even twice a year or more, just check that, clean it, replace it, if it's torn because all the stuff inside your RV. If you have pets, you've got dander, you've got hair, if you use talcum powder, if you have dust, all that stuff is gonna be sucked up through these filters. And if these filters get clogged, it's gonna restrict your airflow, your air conditioner's not gonna run as efficient, and, eventually, it might even ruin your air conditioner. Now we did see a case in a couple videos we've had before where a lady at a campground used a lot of talcum powder. And that powder just kept drifting up and got pulled up inside, these filters ended up tearing, and it completely caked the evaporator coils inside, which we'll get to here in just a little bit. So, it's very important. Check those filters, clean 'em out, and you can just run 'em under regular tap water to clean 'em out. You can use a shop vac if you want. But keep in mind they are a little bit brittle or flimsy so you could tear 'em pretty easy if you do use a shop vac. Be careful with it. So the next thing then, and I'm gonna take this shroud off, get it out of our way for us. So these are the guts of the cooling system, which just about everybody has. And I'm gonna take this front evaporator cover off so we have better access. The next thing you wanna do after you have made sure the filters are clean, this is our warm air return. So what happens is the air inside your RV is gonna be drawn up through this. As this motor takes off, it's gonna draw the air up and pull it back through here. And in our case of the talcum powder, this was completely caked. You couldn't get any air through this whatsoever so the compressor just got hotter and hotter and hotter and the amp draw got up and it didn't cool down, and it finally just ruined the system. But even on the small side, you wanna make sure that this is all cleaned out. And the way you can do that, you don't have to get up on top of the roof, you can do it inside your RV. We'll pull this back and pull this up. When you take off that cold air return, you will see this. This is gonna be wide open in the ceiling of your RV. And you can take a look at these coils, right from there, and tell, do I have a lot of dust? Do I have a lot of dander in here? And maybe just take a shop vac and clean those out. Now, if you have a lot of stuff in here, you might want to get up on top of the roof then. And they do make a solution that you can coat these with that will clean the fins out inside. I typically just use Dawn dish soap, diluted in, and I rinse it with a real low volume hose. Now, the thing you gotta be careful about is this is wide open to your RV. So if I'm up here with water splashing around, that's gonna get wet inside my RV. So you might wanna put a baggie across that, just one of those plastic shopping bags, some Saran Wrap, something to keep that water from going down inside. Then you also wanna look and it's hard to see on the outside, but there's two drain holes in there. And you wanna make sure that those are clean as well. So if you're up here, you got this off, you wanna make sure you get down into these holes. And again, I'm gonna pull this up, make sure I get a good, solid, so you can see this right here and this right here are drain holes. Because when you're pulling that air from inside your RV, it's gonna be warm, moist air and it's gonna go through your evaporator coil and flash and it's gonna take that moisture out and cool that air. And you can only cool it down about 16 degrees, so you've gotta cycle quite a bit if your unit's really, really hot. So we wanna make sure that these are clean, these are open. You don't wanna silicone around the outside, obviously, because that has to get out and go down. That's why you see, every time you step out the door, that big rainfall coming off, it's your condensation out of your air conditioner coming out. One other thing while you're maintaining it, and this doesn't really make it run more efficient, but it's something that you wanna make sure this gasket is tight. And you typically, inside, will have four spring-loaded screws and just make sure they're good and tight because that will compress this and you won't get moisture inside. Very few people do that. We've brought this up many, many times in the videos that you just need to tighten those up. Otherwise, if it starts to break down this seal a little bit and you get a gap, you get water in there and it wicks inside the roof and then you've got big problems, which we've seen before. So then, once you've done this clean out, while you're up here, there's a special little tool and this is just a little fork. And I'm gonna turn this around, a little closer. And you can see some of these fins have started to get a little bit out there. We're gonna come around here and just show. And they don't have to be perfect. It's just that you wanna make sure that you don't get a flat spot along all here 'cause that's gonna restrict that airflow all the way back and then we're gonna have the same problem as if we had a bad filter or plug filter. A couple years ago, something else that happened, we had a local guy that had a unit out in storage. He had it all covered up and this insulation right here was completely chewed up by squirrels. They got up in, underneath it, they nested in here. They chewed up on the styrofoam. And I think it's kind of ironic because we call this fan here a squirrel cage so it literally was a squirrel cage. So here's how the system works. Warm, moist air is brought up from the inside, goes through your evaporator coil, your coolant then flashes in here, brings out the moisture, cools it down, and then it's shot back down on the inside. On the backside here, what's happening, I'm gonna turn this around, a little better shot. So we see our motor here. We see our fan blade here. So as this is spinning, it's pushing the air back down into your RV. But as this is spinning on the backside, it's literally pulling outside air in to cool back down this coolant that's now gotten really hot because of the warm, moist air coming up through here. So it goes back through the condenser coils back here and gets cooled. So these are also important to make sure that you've got good ventilation coming through there. Same thing, use the comb, make sure that they're nice and straight. The thing you see a lot of times with these, now this happens to be a newer unit that's got kind of a neat feature, as you'll notice, this is angled. Now most of them are straight down the back. And the reason they've angled this is so that you don't get as much damage from rain, hail, that type of stuff. It's hard for that to get in here but you still can get branches that you may back up into a campground or something. So, just, every spring do a little bit of maintenance. Take a look at that, make sure those are nice and open so you get good airflow coming in to cool this back down. Otherwise everything's gonna work harder. The amp draw's gonna get higher, it's gonna be less efficient, and you're going to basically burn out the motor and the condenser. Couple other tips on making it run more efficient is don't expect to take a 120 degree RV and cool it down to 65 degrees in a day. It will not do that. You can't let it sit out in the baking sun and get to that temperature unless you have two or three air conditioners. Try to put it in the shade, try to put the unit into a place where you're not gonna be directly into the heat of the sun during the day. And you know, the cooler you can get that inside temperature to start with, the easier this thing is gonna work, the more efficient it's going to be. Another thing is, you know, kind of limit, get some air flow going, use your vents inside to get some of that hot moist air out of there as well when you're starting up the unit and that'll make it run easier. Just take a little bit of time, once in the spring, when you're doing your other, we call it de-winterizing, just take a look at your air conditioner. Just those small little things could make it run a lot more efficient.