You may already be looking ahead to your calendar toward the end of June and the official first day of summer. If you are, make sure that when you think of the coming summer you also think about handling the summer heat with an air conditioner in the best shape possible. If you haven’t arranged for professional maintenance for your air conditioner yet—the spring tune-up and inspection—now is definitely time to have it done!
If this is the first time you’ve heard about spring maintenance, we’re glad we got your attention. Find out more about this vital service below.
Although February is still winter and a reprieve from the cold is a good stretch away (sometimes farther away than we’d like to acknowledge), it’s still a good time to make improvements to your home’s heating system—especially if you’ve noticed the heater hasn’t been doing its job as well as usual during the past few months.
The fall is one of the best times of the year to make major changes to a residential HVAC system. Transitioning between the heat of a Chicago summer into the cold of the winter is a period when you won’t have to rely heavily on either the AC or the heater, so it’s not difficult to arrange for a convenient time to have major repairs done, or to schedule annual maintenance for the heating system.
If you have some knowledge of how the modern air conditioner works, you may know it’s a refrigerant-based system, working in a similar fashion to a refrigerator. To providing cooling, both systems use chemical refrigerant to absorb heat from inside and move the heat to the outside air. This is why the condenser unit outside your house blows out heated air when the AC is working.
We aren’t fully out of the woods yet here in Chicago as far as cool weather goes. We can anticipate days in the 50s and night sometimes in the 30s for a few more weeks. But it’s about that time of year when air conditioners will run more often, and soon the 
The two most common types of heating systems found in homes are