Placeholder for: Window AC cleaning

It’s time to get rid of that musty, moldy and mildew smelly smell filling your room with nasty spores while you snore. (What?)

That’s right! It’s time to clean your window air conditioner. I wrote “Windows air conditioner” twice. Thankfully this is not a MS product. *phew*

If you’ve ever had a window aircon setup or even a split-system air conditioner in your house you know the possibility of it developing various undesirable growths and the smells it can produce especially in high humidity, and particularly when the compressor turns off but the fan continues to spin, releasing a damp, non-dehumidified stank into the room. Smell it yet? Yeah. It’s bad.

Now, how do you clean it? And how do you clean it safely without making the other spectrum of smells by using harsh chemicals? There’s good and bad news but lets start with a little physical and chemical science! Then for the mechanical stuff.

Mold is a physical substance that can be removed when dry. You read that correctly – the spores can be subdued and removed without chemicals if you completely remove it dryly. The issue is that this is particularly difficult to do throughly, nearly impossible in some situations such as with scroll-fans in air conditioners. The other issue is that mold is …everywhere.
I mean, like, e v e r y – w h e r e. Even if you get the mold cleaned out, if you have the right conditions – like humidity and darkness – it will come back. So moving on, management.

If you want mold, add moisture. This is the one thing that makes the latent mold hiding in every room everywhere in every house in the world possible to grow. The only way to prevent mold is to prevent excess moisture. Here’s an interesting viewpoint (I say to myself)- the “Eco” setting on your A/C – the thing that turns off the fan when the compressor stops running – this may actually make things worse. When the fan stops spinning after the compressor has been working and the condenser coils are covered in moisture, it sits there in a perfect environment for growing fungi – notably mold. The best thing to do is keep the settings of your ac in such a combination to be managing the humidity in your room to lower levels, keeping the fan/ac combination settings set so that the moisture is being removed from the unit before it is turned off and the window ac unit angled aggressively enough at a degree to make sure the water leaves the unit outside.

Many modern window units don’t have drain holes outside for the water to leave. They suggest leaving water in the pan to let the fan flick water on the coils will help it to be more efficient – this may be somewhat true, slightly. The problem is now you have the water sitting in a tray collecting nasty – read up on the hospital ac units that had terrible things growing making people sick. eew. I wouldn’t trade health for efficiency, personally. So the water needs a drain.

Saving your water for gardening! (Show the pics.)

Changing things for the cleaning process not to make the plants sick from the cleaning runoff, duh.

And yeah, more later.