PTAC Maintenance for Hotels

They’re an integral part of many hotel rooms, and for good reason: Packaged Terminal Air Conditioning (PTAC) units help to provide custom cooling options for a hotel’s many different kinds of guests. This helps to avoid the situation where one setting suits some and frustrates others.

As efficient and useful as PTACs are, though, they need to be properly maintained in order to perform efficiently. Here are a few tips for keeping your hotel’s PTAC units up and running well:

When first installing PTAC units in a new hotel, have a mechanical engineer determine cooling and heating capacity by calculating factors such as wall wiring, amperage and available voltage. If you are retrofitting an existing space, the PTACs you purchase will need to match up with the existing electrical infrastructure.

Some PTAC units are known to make some unusual noises as they are used over time. This is often the result of a lack of regular cleaning. To remedy this, ensure that the unit’s air discharge path – both outside and inside – is free of obstructions (one common culprit: window coverings or furniture that can block the discharge vents).

Clean all indoor filters on at least a monthly basis. To do this, keep extra filters on hand – roughly 25% more than the hotel might have in use at any one time. This way, the staff could remove one quarter of all PTAC filters every week for cleaning, replacing them with the spare clean filters. The removed filters can then replace the next one-quarter of filters, and so on, ensuring that all of the rooms in the establishment have had their PTAC filters cleaned once per month.

And at least once every year, remove the PTAC units from the sleeve and thoroughly clean them.

Depending on the climate in your area of the country, you may wish to also buy time-released algaecide pads to install in the base of a clean PTAC unit. This will keep algae from mucking up the coils and possibly causing the compressor to overheat.

More questions about PTAC maintenance? Contact an AC World specialist today!