Your HVAC system is one of the most important aspects of your facilities. It makes up a large portion of your energy bills and keeps your offices comfortable. Depending on your industry, it also may keep products and machinery at usable temperatures. If your HVAC system breaks down, it can result in downtime—and significant losses for your company. That’s why you should consider HVAC preventive maintenance for your system. This post discusses what it is, and how hiring a commercial HVAC company to perform it can benefit your business.

What Is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance (PM) is the process of identifying potential problems in an HVAC system before they cause breakdowns that lead to downtime and losses for your business. It is the opposite of reactive maintenance, which is waiting until a machine or system breaks down to have it serviced. While reactive maintenance may seem like a cost-effective form of maintenance management at first, it ends up costing much more money in the long run. Relying on reactive maintenance measures can lead to higher utility bills and breakdowns that stem from easily avoidable problems, such as dirty air filters or broken fan belts. By using preventive maintenance, such as changing your HVAC’s air filter every month, you can help increase your HVAC system’s energy efficiency and lifespan.

What Is an HVAC Preventive Maintenance Contract and How Does It Work?

A preventive maintenance contract is an agreement between your business and a commercial HVAC company stating that they can performance routine maintenance checks on your system. When you enter into a preventive maintenance agreement with an HVAC company, it should be customized to fit your business’s needs, how the system heats, cools, and ventilates the building, and whether products or machines in the building require specific heating and cooling maintenance plans in their storage or operation areas.

What Do Regular Maintenance Checks Look Like? How Do They Help My Business?

Ideally, maintenance visits should occur once a month, but, again, their frequency can be modified to meet your needs. During a maintenance visit, a technician should perform system checks, check your thermostat’s operation, change the air filters, and check drip pans and drain lines.
However, those are just the bare essentials of an HVAC maintenance check. When a client joins Garrison Mechanical’s HVAC PM program, we perform a variety of checks that go beyond the most basic ones. For example, we check the evaporator and condenser coils for corrosion and cleanliness, inspect fan and motor bearings, lubricate all of the system’s moving parts, and take temperature measurements across the coil—and those are just a handful of the checks we run. The more thorough a maintenance visit is, the more potential problems it can prevent.
When your system receives routine maintenance checks, it is always receiving the attention it needs so it can work properly. Also, when you have a technician visiting regularly, you can keep a preventive maintenance checklist so they know what your concerns are and which parts of your system need the most attention at different times of year.

Start Your Preventive Maintenance Program Today

If you’re interested in exploring an HVAC PM contract or if you have additional questions about the process, contact Garrison Mechanical today. We’ll work with you to determine your system’s infrastructure and its maximum energy efficiency.
We’ll also determine where your system’s problem areas are and how to fix them. When you enter into a PM contract with us, we also offer emergency HVAC services, so you’ll always know whom to call when you have any trouble with your HVAC system. However, our preventive maintenance program should keep your HVAC system running well for a long time by taking care of problems before they reach their peak.