While your furnace may be the last thing on your mind as summer enters its home stretch, right now is an ideal time to perform routine furnace maintenance to be sure your heating system is ready to go when the cool weather arrives. Like your air conditioner, your furnace has filters that need regular cleaning or replacement during its active season. If your furnace has disposable filters, you’ll be shopping around for new ones, and you may be wondering about all the different ratings that apply to furnace filters. Which are the most important, and what do they mean?
Three of the most important ratings for furnace filters are the MERV rating, the efficiency ratings and the dust-holding capacity rating:
- MERV stands for “minimum efficiency reporting value,” and it is a standard rating used across the entire HVAC industry for certain types of filters. As a consumer, look for furnace filters with high MERV ratings — this means they have superior efficiencies.
- Efficiency ratings include initial efficiency and sustained efficiency. Initial efficiency expresses how well a filter works when it’s brand new (many furnace filters work best once they’ve been broken in, not when they’re new). Sustained efficiency is an average of the efficiency rating that a given filter displays over the course of its lifespan.
- Dust-holding capacity is a metric that describes how much dust a given furnace filter can trap before it becomes completely saturated. If you’re wondering how often a given furnace filter will need cleaning or replacement, the dust-holding capacity rating is a good one to look for.
If you need help selecting the right furnace filter, or if you’d like more information about the various ratings used to describe their efficiencies, contact the experts at Marsh Heating & Air Conditioning. We’ve been helping homeowners in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area save money and optimize their home HVAC efficiencies for more than three decades.
Our goal is to help educate our customers about energy and home comfort issues (specific to HVAC systems). For more information about furnace filters and other HVAC topics, download our free Home Comfort Resource guide.
Marsh Heating and Air Conditioning services Minnesota’s Twin Cities. Visit our website to see our special offers and get started today!