How Often Should You Service an Air Conditioner in Cairns, and What Does a Real Service Include?

Most people service an air conditioner the way they service a car: when it starts making a noise. In Cairns that usually means the first properly hot week, the unit that has run untouched since last summer finally gives up, and the call goes in along with everyone else’s. The service schedule printed on the unit does not help much either, because it was written for a dry, temperate city, not for a place where the air is wet for half the year.

So here is what we actually tell customers across Cairns, the northern beaches, Edmonton, Gordonvale and the Tablelands, based on what we pull out of units up here.

How often, by system type

• Wall-mounted split systems. A full service once a year is the minimum, and the right time is before summer, not during it. A bedroom unit that runs every night from October to April is doing more hours than the same unit down south does in three years. If it lives near the coast, from Machans Beach up to Palm Cove, salt in the air adds to the case for yearly.
• Ceiling cassettes. Same yearly minimum, but cassettes hide their problems. The coil and drain tray sit above the ceiling where nobody looks, so a blocked drain shows up as a stain on the plaster rather than a puddle on the floor. Yearly, and sooner if the unit starts to smell on start-up.
• Ducted systems. Yearly for the indoor unit and the return-air filter, plus a look at the ducting itself. A ducted system that is cooling some rooms and not others is often a duct problem rather than a refrigeration one.
• Commercial units and anything in a shop, office or kitchen. Twice a year. They run longer hours, in dustier air, and the cost of one going down on a trading day is a lot higher than the cost of a second service.

Why the tropics change the answer

An air conditioner cools by pulling warm, humid air across a cold coil. In Cairns that air carries a lot of moisture, so the coil is wet for most of its working life. A wet coil with a little dust on it is exactly what mould wants. That is the musty smell when the unit starts, and it is also why a unit that has never been chemically cleaned struggles to cool: the coil is coated, air cannot get through it, and the compressor runs flat out to achieve very little.

Add the wet season, when the outdoor unit sits in weeks of rain and the drain line has to carry more condensate than it was ever designed for, and a yearly service stops being a manufacturer suggestion and becomes the difference between a unit that lasts twelve years and one that is replaced at six.

What a real service actually includes

This is worth spelling out, because a lot of what gets sold as a service is a filter rinse and a wipe of the cover. That takes ten minutes and does almost nothing for the coil. A proper service on a split system or cassette looks like this:

• Covers off and the indoor coil chemically cleaned, not just brushed. This is the step that removes the mould and the coating that stops the unit cooling.
• Filters washed and dried, and the fan barrel cleaned, because a fouled barrel throws less air and makes more noise.
• The condensate drain cleared and tested so it can carry a wet-season load without backing up into the ceiling or down the wall.
• The outdoor unit checked, cleared and the fins cleaned, especially on the beaches where salt builds up.
• Refrigerant charge checked. Refrigerant does not get used up, so a low reading means a leak, which is licensed work to find and repair.
• Electrical connections and the capacitor checked, then the unit run and tested cooling properly before we leave.

Anything that opens the refrigerant circuit is licensed work in Australia. FNQ Air Solutions Pty Ltd holds ARCTick refrigerant handling licence AU62644 and QBCC licence 15533799, both checkable on the public registers.

The two jobs that are yours in between

• Filters, monthly through summer. Lift the front panel, slide them out, wash, dry completely, put them back. In the tropics this is a monthly job, not a yearly one, and it is the single biggest thing you can do to keep the unit cooling between services.
• Clear around the outdoor unit. Keep plants, bins and fence panels off it so it can dump heat. On the coast, a gentle hose with fresh water gets the salt off the fins.

Getting it booked

We do air conditioning servicing and maintenance across Cairns city and the inner suburbs, the beaches from Machans Beach to Palm Cove, south through Edmonton and Gordonvale, and up the Range to Mareeba and Atherton. The pre-summer maintenance offer is running through September and October, which is the right time to have it done, before the heat and the breakdown queue arrive. Tell us the suburb and the type of system and we will tell you when we can be there.