Do You Maintain Your Car Better Than Your HVAC System?

Americans love their cars. Not surprising, as the average family spends upwards of 1,000 hours driving each year, putting 30,000 miles on their family vehicles. Your car is your home away from home, whether it’s a luxury or a necessity or both! Cars themselves are expensive, rising gas prices put a strain on family budgets, and regular maintenance with oil changes and repairs can tally up to more than $500 per car per year.

Now consider your lowly and often-forgotten HVAC unit. While you may drive each of your cars about 500 hours per year, your HVAC unit runs more than 4,000 hours per year on average, the energy equivalent of over 110,000 miles! And yet, families frequently neglect the furnace or air conditioning system tune-ups that keep their high performance machines running in proper working and energy-efficient order.

While a car breakdown is an inconvenience and a hassle to get fixed, an HVAC system breakdown is a serious concern for home owners. Ask any homeowner who has woken up to frozen pipes in the winter or come home to sweltering conditions in the summer, and you’ll hear tales of frantic calling to find an HVAC repairman who can come immediately.

One of the best ways to maintain your HVAC system is scheduling regular tune-ups. Unlike car maintenance, which usually happens once every 3 months, an HVAC tune-up only needs to be scheduled approximately once per year, but the results are that you’re protecting a system that is far more important and more hardworking than any vehicle on the road.