Chemical washing of air conditioning units is always expensive. It is a difficult decision to make for the novice especially when the air conditioner is still in good working condition after the last servicing. Also, chemical washing of air conditioning units can be messy involving a lot of after-service work such as floor cleaning, etc. This article will describe a simple and yet cost-effective way to verify if chemical washing is necessary.
How They Tell?
The very experienced will often determine if a chemical washing is required by just visually inspecting the condition of the fan coil. The more responsible mechanics might carry out air flow, refrigeration pressure, or cooling coil temperature measurements. But the result of these is just "Greeks" to the Novice. Some might like to be convinced if the expensive chemical washing work is required.
A quick and dirty method to tell if chemical washing is required is to use backlight inspection. This method will use a bright light shining from the back of the fan coil unit. The Novice can easily use this method to verify if a chemical washing is required.
What's Needed?
All one needs is a very bright inspection lamp that can be inserted behind the coils. This lamp must be small & thin enough to "snake" through the very narrow space around and behind the axial fan as shown.
This brightly lighted lamp behind the cooling coils will allow one to inspect the fins. If the fins are badly clogged with dirt, one could hardly see the bright light emitted by the lamps.
Where to Buy this lamp?
This lamp can be purchased from Internet Shopping.
The alternative is to construct such a lamp using the following components from eBay:
To make these cheap eBay lamps as inspection lamps, one might have to stiffen the lamp wiring with some sort of thin gauge stainless wire or equivalent.
One could also construct this inspection lamp quickly using SMD LEDs powered by AA-size batteries with steel wire as stiffener as shown in the following picture. The number of batteries to be used will depend on the rating of the LEDs. Usually, 3 batteries would be more than enough to power up the LED lamp. The addition of a small copper heat sink would ensure lasting performance. The SMD LEDs can be extracted from spoilt LED lamps.
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