Air conditioning is a wonderful thing and hopefully yours is just about maintenance-free. There are a couple of things you need to do, though.

1. You want to keep the air filter clean.
2. Take care of the outside unit. This is where the compressor is. The fan pulls air through these fins which protects the coils in there and the air cools it off. If the air can't get through there because you got vines growing up or you got dust or dirt or something like that, then you're not getting the efficiency you ought to have and you could burn up your compressor.

I want you to get out a couple of times during the season and remove all the vines that you have growing there, and then I'm going to show you what to do about all the dust that's down here. This is an easy thing to do. Just pull them on off of there. Go all the way around, wherever these fins are, and clean off this dust, but wait... The first thing you're supposed to do before you do anything with this next step is - go inside and trip the circuit breaker switch. And what you're going to do is take the hose, turn on a strong blast and you're just going to blast through there and you can see it really does clean that dust out of there pretty good. You want to go all the way around, make sure it's good and clean. If there are any things down in here like this you can get your wet/dry vacuum and clean that out. When you get through you're going to have a happy air conditioner that's really going to be a lot more efficient.

I'm Super Handyman Al Carrell -About the House.