Perhaps not on the top of your things to do, cleaning filters is recommended to keep equipment running well and to maintain hygene and can reduce energy usage a little.

Very useful for the filters on air blowers, air-to-air heat pumps, air conditioners and fan filters or air extractors. Even for equipment that is not used all the time, the benefits may be really useful. Does you vacuum cleaner lack suction or need more power to do the same job it used to do easily? Does your dishwasher fail to clean as well as it used to? Does your tumble dryer take longer to dry clothes or leave lint on fabrics? Is there an odour coming from your cooker hood?

A few years back I listened to complaints from someone trying hard to clean a relatively large building with a bagless vacuum cleaner that was performing poorly: it was a relatively new vacuum cleaner but it failed to shift dirt and fluff from the carpets, wasting time and creating frustration. Sharing the story with me about how poor it was and the futile attempts to empty a seemingly empty dust collector, we ended up taking a few minutes to check all the parts and found a blocked carpet foot attachment, a blocked flexible tube and blocked filters. Over the next five minutes we cleaned each part and finally the vacuum suction came back properly and with that so did some joy of the job. It was a salutary lesson in the merits of good old fashioned maintenance. Have you ever had such an experience where a little care and cleaning has breathed new life into old equipment?

Cleaning filters might save you the expense of replacing poorly performing equipment prematurely by getting it back to how it used to work when it was new.