The filter you breathe through.
Every bit of air coming through your vents passes a pollen filter first. It's cheap, it's quick, and it's the single most ignored part on most cars. We'll change it as part of a service or on its own.
Message us with your reg →A pleated paper filter, usually behind the glovebox.
It sits between the outside world and your vents, catching pollen, dust, soot and the general grime of sitting in traffic. Pleated so there is far more surface area than the space suggests, which is why a small one lasts as long as it does.
Here is the part most people never connect: a blocked filter doesn't just smell. It chokes the airflow the whole heating and air-con system depends on, so the fan works harder, the demist takes longer, and the air-con feels weak even though nothing is actually wrong with it. Plenty of “my air-con has gone” turns out to be a filter that hasn't been changed since the car was new.
How to tell yours has had enough
You will usually smell it before anything else.
- A musty or damp smell when you turn the fan on, worst on the first blast
- Weaker airflow from the vents even with the fan turned up
- The windows taking longer to demist than they used to
- Air-con that does not feel as cold as it did, without any fault in the system itself
- Hay fever that is noticeably worse in the car than out of it
It genuinely varies by car, so we're not going to invent a number. Your handbook will give the manufacturer's interval. As a rule of thumb, if you do a lot of city driving or sit in traffic daily, yours is working harder than the handbook assumes. Ask us and we'll have a look at it while the car is in.
What a fresh one gets you.
A fresh filter goes back to catching the pollen, dust and soot it is meant to, instead of letting it through into the car with you.
A blocked filter chokes the fan. Change it and the vents blow properly again, on heat and on cold alike.
A lot of weak air-con is not a fault in the system at all, just a filter that has stopped letting enough air through. It is the cheap thing to rule out first.
More air moving across the screen means the windows clear quicker on a cold or damp morning.
Change it on its own, or with a service.
It is a quick, cheap job and one of the few that makes an immediate difference you can feel. Send us your reg, or add it when you book a service.
All prices include VAT. MOTs are zero-rated, so there is no VAT on an MOT.