Tips for RV Air Conditioner Maintenance

With just a little bit of maintenance, your air conditioner can run a lot more efficient. The first thing we wanna do is take off these covers here and check our filters. Our roof air conditioners like these are gonna have filters on both sides of these louvers. And we wanna make sure about every two weeks during operation is what the air conditioning company recommends. a little bit here.

Let me take these two screws off. Take the knobs off the front. Now, this unit has the controls on the front of it. Some of the newer units will have controls back on the thermostat and probably duct the roofer. And then we just slide this forward, bring this down.

And here's one of the filters and as you can see, this is pretty not much, has not been changed every two weeks. Here's the other one that's been sucked up into the vent itself. So this is not been running very efficient. And again, so we're gonna take these out. We're just gonna vacuum them up.

If they're really bad, we could wash them, let them dry out really good before we would put them back in. But while we're here the next thing we're gonna do is look in your owner's manual. And this happens to be for this unit here, and this great big pile of information does have some very important information but typically most of us don't read it. But take out the owner's manual for your air conditioning section. And every few years you wanna come in and check these bolts right here with these little springs on them.

Inside this there's a gasket. That's the, in-between the machine and the top section, the compressor part of this air conditioner. And with that gasket, we want to make sure that we have the right compression on that. If we just let it sit, it's gonna loosen up. We're gonna get moisture in the inside of it where it starts to get sagging out around this.

So check the specs, we'll get torque settings, bring them in, and just give a nice good snug, and that torque setting. So like I said just do that every couple of years. Just make sure that they're nice and tight. Now, the next thing I'm going to do is I'm gonna take these filters and I'm gonna go clean them. So we have our two filters cleaned.

We're gonna put them back in the cavity here. And they are cut angled. So we wanna make sure we get them in the right direction here. We're gonna slide this back up, getting our knobs in first, slide it back. You just nice and snug in these not too tight because of the road vibration.

If you tighten them up really hard, it's gonna crack this plastic trout. So we just want them snugged up there and then put our knobs back on. And the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna go up on the roof. We have one more piece of maintenance up there. We wanna take a look at the cooling fins just to make sure that they're not smashed down and we need to straighten some of those out.

So let's go up in the roof. On the top of the roof we're gonna take a look visually at the shroud and make sure the covering doesn't have any cracks. Make sure none of these bolts have been sheared off. If they have, we're gonna have to get a new cover. But one of the most important things is we're gonna look back at the fins on the backside here.

These are the cooling fins, and we're supposed to get air exhausting through this. And if we get a lot of the flattened spots like you see here, the stuff pushed in, we're not gonna get the cooling that we need to come out of it. So you wanna just take something like a table knife or a screwdriver or something like this with a flat edge and just kind of go through, and pull these back out. And it's a little tedious, but, again these aren't too bad here. I don't have a lot of stuff but, you'll get some where they do a lot of camping, in places with trees and stuff like that.

You get some branches that gonna come in and actually wrap around the backside of this. Just kind of straighten them out as best you can. So you get a little bit of airflow going through there. I notice we got another one up in the front just like that. We'll take care of that one too but, a little bit of maintenance, just to make sure you got good air flow in here.

Like would inside the filters, the gaskets, make sure you tighten those bolts up once a year, every two years. And your air conditioner will run a lot more efficient.