The Effect of Candles on Your Furnace Air Filters

By: Brian Schutt | February 19, 2018

Did you know that candles and furnace filters are connected? Continue reading for my personal experience of how I first discovered this to be true!

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you know there’s no shortage of reminders to change your home HVAC filters on a regular basis:

But there are still some times when we inadvertently ignore our own advice. Watch the video below to find out how I personally discovered yet another reason to change your air filter regularly — and in this case even more regularly. Or, scroll down to read the transcript.

Hey everybody, it’s Brian Schutt with Homesense. Once again, quick little tip here. And this one is actually a personal story.

So, about two weeks ago, weather was really cold, and I had to call my own company out to my house. And so, if you’ve listened to me over any amount of time, you know the first thing that I always tell everybody else to do is check your filter. And what I didn’t do was check my filter.

And the reason that I didn’t do this was that I had just changed my filter less than a month beforehand,
and so you can kind of see behind me, I put up on the screen, the picture of the filters after my technician Kary came out.

And so, the lesson that I wanted to pass along — that I didn’t know after doing this for eight years — my wife likes to burn candles around Christmas time. And so with a month-worth of candle burning and my brand new filter that’s supposed to last 6-9 months, that had accumulated and pulled into the system and turned the filters black, as you can see behind me.

And it’s not just that it turned it black, but it was what it consisted of. Obviously that wax dissipates, gets into the air, and they get pulled back into the system. And it was enough to cause the filters to get clogged and cause the system to stop, to start shutting down, and not heating appropriately.

So, a quick little tidbit of information, that if you burn candles, you should be conscious that you might need to be changing your filters even more quickly than normal, so just a little thought to drop on you today. And now you know the connection between candles and furnace filters!

Let us know if you need us to check your system.