When you’ve called to get ducted reverse cycle air conditioning service, do your visiting professionals let you know about problems that might have been affecting your system recently. If you are using consummate professionals, they should advise you about things they’ve had to repair that might have resulted from things beyond normal wear and tear.

If you’ve not been informed, then hopefully our list below will help educate you on the most common things that can damage air conditioning.

1. Low Refrigerant Levels

Refrigerant is used to push out both heat and moisture from your indoor air. Refrigerant is usually quite secure within the system, but if there’s any factor that causes the refrigerant to leak such as a force majeure, or excessive wear and tear, for instance, then refrigerant levels will begin to drop and at best your air conditioning system won’t be able to cool your home or office anymore. At worst, you could see toxic refrigerant leaking into your working or living space.

2. Dirty Condenser Coils

The condenser coils’ function is to take hot air and “dispose” of it outside the building. If you’ve felt heat coming from outdoor AC units before, that’s coming from the condenser coils. Because they’re outdoors, however, it’s easy for them to get dirty and covered in dust and other things. When they do, they become unable to function. In a dry and often dusty inland environment in Australia, this can be a serious problem.

Condenser coils therefore need to be cleaned regularly to prevent any blocking of the heat exchange. If that process is blocked, you’ll not only risk damage and excess wear and tear to the machine, but the AC unit will have to work harder, consuming more energy and delivering you higher energy bills.

3. You Evaporator Coils Are Frozen

Another set of coils at risk is the evaporator coils. These are normally filled with refrigerant to absorb excess heat from the surrounding environment. In order for the evaporator coils to work properly, they need warm air to be flowing around the outside, but if that is interrupted and the ambient temperature falls far enough, then the coils can freeze because of the refrigerant inside. It’s at that point that your supply of cooler air for those hot days will drop.

4. Rodents and Pests

All manner of rodents and other pests can become the bane of your air conditioning system if their activities go ahead unchecked. First of all, there’s the danger posed by mice and rats that can crawl into small spaces and ducts and steal vital materials from there to build their nests. Mice and rats can also chew on electrical wires, leaving you with expensive and potentially dangerous problems to fix.

Smaller pests like termites, ants, and even snakes can also work their way into your AC system. Finding a snake curled up in the condenser is never a welcome sight. If ants or termites build mounds close to your outdoor components, you can end up with short outs on your electrical connections.

5. Poor-Quality Installation and Maintenance Work

Bad workmanship is another more perfidious cause of AC damage and other problems. If installers cheap out on the right kinds of electrical wiring and other components that aren’t suitable for your particular setup, then it might work in the short term but sooner or later will leave you with constantly tripping circuit breakers at best, and electrical fires and other dangerous happenings at best.

Using qualified, certified and experienced engineers to install AC systems is therefore of paramount importance.