A Fix That Does The Work For You

Do you have central air conditioning and/or heating? If so, make sure you're changing your filter(s) regularly. A clean filter can prevent the spread of dust and improve the air quality in your home. It can also prolong the life of your machine.

How often should you do it? That depends. Most manufacturers recommend changing your filter every 3 months or so, but I say that advice should be a bit conditional. 

Change your filter(s) once a month if you…

• Have pets.
• Have four or more people living in your home.
• Have someone who smokes in your home.
• Run the unit most of the time.
• Have been generating more dust and/or grime than usual, for example through renovations.
• Live in a dusty, dry climate.
• Live in an area with poor air quality (such as in a large city.)
• Live in an area where wildfires have been occurring.
• Have an HVAC unit that is old and/or problematic.
• Use cheap filters.

Change your filter every 3 months if you…

• Have no pets.
• Have three people or less living in your home.
• Run the unit less often (for example only at night, or only when it's really hot outside.)
• Have a unit that's relatively new.
• Use pleated and/or higher quality filters.

Change your filter every 6-9 months if you…

• Don't live in the home full time (for example, you're only there on weekends.)

Do you need to buy expensive filters, or will the cheap ones suffice?

Depends on your goal. If you just want to protect your unit from dust and debris, you should be able to get away with using the cheapest version as long as you change it often enough. 

But if you also want to improve the air quality inside your home—which is the goal in a House That Cleans Itself—go with a somewhat higher quality filter.

On the other hand, you probably don't need the highest quality, most expensive filters unless…

• Someone in your home suffers from environmental allergies like dust or pollen.
• You have multiple pets.
• You have an infant in the home.

Learn more here about filter rating systems and how you can decide what's best for your house and how you live.

The Most Important Step

It has been my observation that the main reason people procrastinate when it comes to changing filters is simply that they can't remember what size they're supposed to buy. Check your manufacturer's instructions, then record that size (usually expressed in inches, such as "24 x 24 x 1") somewhere that the information can be easily accessed, such as in a memo in your smartphone. Better yet, subscribe to a repeating delivery for the desired time interval of the correct size filters for your home. Whenever they show up, that means it's time to make a change. And it doesn't get much easier than that!