As we were searching for a new house to buy last year, something caught my attention.
I have never lived anywhere besides by the beach and one thing I know about salt air is that it causes metal to rust faster than the air that is not coming off of the ocean.
I have never worried much about this because I just think that it is one of the many things you have to deal with if you choose to live by the beach. One thing I didn’t think about was how quickly AC units can begin to rust. While searching for a new home at the beach, I noticed that most if not all of the AC units that we looked at had already begun to rust. Apparently, this is something that everyone living at the beach lives with. The look of the rust on the AC unit didn’t really bother me, it was the fact that they would need to be replaced much earlier than an AC unit at a house located more inland would have to be replaced. I Started to wonder how often these AC units really needed to be replaced by the ocean. Was there some sort of preventative maintenance that could be done to avoid such deterioration? I asked around and most people informed me that the damage was simply cosmetic and that the rust didn’t have an effect on the maintenance of the machine. I was very happy to learn about this when I was learning about AC and rust from the salty air by the ocean.