Did you pack the car, truck or SUV and head out from McHenry on that long-anticipated camping trip? Did you load all your fishing gear and drive up to a cabin on the Boundary Waters? Either way, or both if you were twice as fortunate in getting away, there’s a good chance you left the so-called beaten trail. In other words, you drove those dirt backroads that tend to cover your vehicle in dust.

Even if you didn’t go offroad on some adventure, they’ve got this thing in summer that is also found around McHenry called “road construction.” As with the off-road adventure, road construction kicks up a bit of dust.

Like most of us, you probably responded to all that dust by running the car, truck or SUV through the carwash when the adventure was over. But those airborne particles did more than coat your vehicle with dust; they attacked every crack and crevice and opening they could find in the vehicle.

Where else could the dust go? 

Anywhere you can think of, that’s where the dust went on and in your vehicle. Open the hood and you’ll find the same layer of dust in the engine compartment, and probably thicker.

Why would the dust in your engine compartment be thicker you ask? Because the engine has a fan at the front designed to draw air through the radiator. And if the air is full of dust, the dust is coming in with the air. And the dust doesn’t stop there.

If you drive through a dusty area, even if you kept the windows up, you’ll notice a thin veneer of the dust inside the cabin of your car. You may have less of this if you are recirculating the air in the cabin. But that dust is persistent and pernicious. 

Fortunately, you won’t find as thick of a layer of dust inside the car, truck or SUV unless you did drive those dusty roads with your windows open. The reason is that the engineers who designed your vehicle were aware of the ability of foreign particles to invade the cabin. They setup a trap for the dust. We call that trap a cabin filter.

Most cabin filters are accessible through the back of the glovebox. And while they do an admirable job of filtering out the dust that is in the air, the dust they filter doesn’t evaporate; it’s stuck there in the filter. As more and more dust accumulates in the filter it becomes necessary to replace the filter with a new clean filter. But let’s get back to the engine compartment.

The engine is a fairly tightly sealed piece of equipment, with some significant exceptions.

And engine uses a mix of fuel and oxygen to run. And the fast majority of engines in cars, trucks, and SUVs get their oxygen from all around them. They use the air that you drive through.

A fuel filter filters foreign particles in the fuel, and an air filter filters particles out of the air. After that backroad excursion, or driving past those construction zones, the air filter has had quite a workout.  Just as with the cabin filter, it’s done it’s job. Now it’s time for it to retire. It’s time to replace the air filter with a new filter.

Even if you don’t escape from Richmond into the backwoods, even if you never drive past road construction, your filters are still working. Foreign particles are still accumulating in them. The filters in your car, truck or SUV may not require changing as often, but they’ll still reach a point where you do want to replace them. And the only way to find out is to check them or have them checked.