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 want to do is take off these covers here, check our filters. Our roof air conditioners like this, 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. Let that hang down 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 roof air. 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 much has not been changed every two weeks.

Here's the other one that's been sucked up into the vent itself so this has not been running very efficient and again. So we're going to take these out. We're just going to vacuum them up. If they're really bad, we can 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 going to 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 want to 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 set, it's going to loosen up.

We're going to get moisture in the inside of it. We're gonna start to get sagging out around this. So check the specs, we'll get the torque setting, bring them in and just give a nice, good snug at 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 going to take these filters and I'm going to go clean them.

So we have our two filters cleaned. We're going to put them back in the cavity here and they are cut angled. So we want to make sure we get them in the right direction here. We're going to slide this back up getting our knobs in first. Slide it back.

Just nice and snug on these, not too tight because the road vibration, if you tighten them up really hard it's going to crack this plastic shroud. So we just want them snugged up there and then put our knobs back on. And the last thing we're going to do is we're going to go up on the roof. We have one more piece of maintenance up there. We want to take a look at the cooling fans just to make sure that they're not smashed down or we need to straighten some of those out.

So let's go up on the roof. On the top of the roof we're going to take a look visually at the shroud. Make sure the covering doesn't have any cracks. Make sure none of these bolts have been sheared off. If they have, we're going to 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 going to get the cooling that we need to come out of it. So you want to 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'm not, 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. And you get some branches that will 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. And I notice we've 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 make sure you got good air flow in here. Like inside the filters, the gaskets, make sure you tighten those bolts up once every, once a year, every two years and your air conditioning will run a lot more efficient.