Recently I was reading a Family Handyman online article on 5 things you should do for your vehicle and it mentioned changing the in-cabin air filters once a year. If you click on the image to the left it will take you to their article.
I’d had issues with the filters leading to my cabin. I had parked my vehicle outside at a friend’s house for a few days while we traveled and when I got back the smell in the car was grotesque. A ridiculous amount of money later I found out that in my absence a mama mouse had gotten in there and had a bunch of babies — they all died and made my car smell like an abattoir. As I mentioned, they charged me so much money to clean the mess I figured the dash had to come off. They never once mentioned there were filters involved that could be replaced or should be replaced annually. Great repair shop.
The Family Handyman article was the first I heard of putting in new filters annually. I checked online and found the filters aren’t hard to access on my Nissan Xterra. You squeeze the sides of the glove box to make it flop down and then release a little string that holds it. The cover to the air filters is behind there. A little more research and I found the air filters (my vehicle takes two) online for $11.
The filters arrived yesterday so this morning I pulled out the old filters and found they were filthy and still full of mouse poop! They hadn’t even cleaned the filters out! I was not happy to see that I’ve been breathing mouse poop for almost 2 years. I wondered if the filters had ever been changed on my six-year-old vehicle.
It took me all of 15 minutes to get the dirty ones out and get nice, new clean ones in. This little piece of maintenance it going on my calendar to be done every September from now on.
Not all vehicles have in-cabin filters, but it’s definitely worth checking to see if you have some that may need to be changed.
Follow up note: The fan for my heater/AC had been noisy ever since the guys removed the dead mice. Level 3 was annoying and Level 4 was getting really annoying. I figured the mice or getting them out had damaged something.
I cranked up the AC after putting in the new filters and no more annoying noise, just the normal whirring of the fan. My thoughts? Maybe the fan has to work really hard to pull air through filthy filters and is now able to pull air easily. Seems like filthy filters may be a good way to wear out the fan before it’s time. Another reason to change the filters regularly, that is if breathing clean air isn’t enough.
