Last summer I installed a mini-split heat pump on the garage. My goal was to make the garage usable as a work shop (and smoking lounge) year round, without sweltering heat in summer and frigid temperatures in winter. The summer thing worked out pretty well; the heat pump seemed to keep up and it didn’t impact the electric bill more than it was worth.
This winter was a little different story. I know the garage is a little leaky, but the unit seemed to struggle to keep it much above the low 50s on cold days, and my last electric bill was about double what we usually see. I was considering adding a supplemental heat source, and truthfully a little disappointed. The unit’s specs said it would operate down to something like -4 F.
Yesterday afternoon I wanted to make a change to the aiming of the air vent, and noticed that there was barely any air flow. What little there was was quite warm, but it was obviously not enough to do much good. Hmmm. I grabbed a ladder and checked the intake filter on top of the unit… and found it almost totally blocked by a thick layer of brown crud.
Dummy!! After all the time I spend trying to get our rental tenants to change their furnace filters, I let this happen! And I should have known it would clog up, as I spent hours running the table saw out here to make cabinets and stuff. I rather sheepishly vacuumed the screen off and plopped the filter back in place and was rewarded with a blast of warm air that fairly quickly brought the garage up to the set temperature.
Lesson learned! I’ll be cleaning that at least monthly, and replacing the ERV filter on schedule. Things don’t work right when you don’t take care of them. I knew that and still got lazy and neglected it. That won’t happen again.