This little chore has been on my list of things to do for quite a while... we had our gas ducted heating removed last year and replaced with a reverse cycle heat pump system, much better for the environment and lots better for our utility bills... and with the option to have cooling in the summer in addition to the the heating in the winter. And so far, it has proved to be a great upgrade from the ducted gas heating... it isn't as fast, but it is good when it slowly ramps up the heating all around the house. The gas was not quite heating the whole house... and it wasn't even at all, with one end of the house getting stinking hot, whilst the other side was freezing!

Anyway, I was told that I should clean out the intake filters once every now and then... and I have been meaning to... but when you haven't done a particular thing before, you do tend to put it off! Then as the temperature dropped over the last couple of weeks, I was wondering if the system was running at a good efficiency... or if it was struggling a little due to the lower intake of air?

So, I gathered up my lack of practical wits... and started taking the two covers off the intake vents for the system... and of course, the first one that I tried (not the pictured one...) was really hard to get the grill open and the filter out! That stymied me... and I was just about to give up on the whole thing... but I thought that I would try the other larger grill... and that was really easy to open!

... hmmm, and you can see the huge amount of small dust built up on the filter! The top half has been vacuumed and cleaned a bit (I could have taken it outside and done it better but it was night-time and it was pretty bloody cold out there! And you can quite clearly see the difference between the top and the bottom halves! So definitely a lower intake of air from this vent...

... and after dinner, my wife helped me out with the other vent... which had a trickier latch system that I hadn't been able to figure out... but my wife did, and once that was off, I could also clean out that filter... and that was just a dirty and clogged with lots of dust!

So, I've since checked to see how often I should be doing this... apparently about once a month... so, I will have to add that my list of once a month chores... add money to the super, check the tyre pressures... and now clean the dust filters.

But now that that it has been done once, I think that this is actually going to be an easy half hour job. The first step is always the most difficult!

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