When To Replace Your Cabin Air Filter

Keeping your car’s filters clean is a crucial element of routine vehicle maintenance – not only to ensure that everything continues to work properly, but also to make for a healthier, more comfortable driving experience. But what exactly is a cabin air filter, what does it do, and how often does it need to be replaced?

Let’s start by making sure we’re on the same page first

What's a cabin air filter (and what does it do?)

Your car’s cabin air filter is importantly different from the air filter you may more commonly hear of: the engine air filter. Both are responsible, as you might guess from their names, for filtering air to different sections of the car. Your engine filter is there to ensure that only clean air is getting into the engine – therefore ensuring clean combustion and more efficient fuel economy.

The cabin air filter, on the other hand, is responsible for filtering particulates out of the air for the air con system. This is usually both for air taken in from the outside, and air circulated within the cabin itself. While it may at first seem redundant to filter the air that’s circulated, this is intended to catch dust and mould that’s generated within the car (for example, from moisture buildup from breathing) or that comes in through open windows. For this reason, it’s also frequently called a “Pollen Filter” – even though it filters much more than just pollen!

Filtering within the cabin is especially important for things like your air con system, because moisture buildup in your car’s ducting can lead to all sorts of nasty bacterial and fungal growth.

How often do you need to replace your cabin air filter?

The nature of the way filters work is that, eventually, they get clogged up and need to be replaced. Failing to do so means you’ll get to breathe dirty air at best, or cause health problems and air pump malfunctions at worst – so it’s definitely worth staying on top of this!

The exact interval for when they need to be replaced varies depending on the car make & model, but the usual recommendation is that they’re replaced every 15,000 to 30,000 miles – which is about once a year for daily commuting drivers, and every two years for infrequent drivers.

Crucially, we’ll replace your air filter as part of any Full Service (our annual service package). Even more crucially, it’s wise to have this replacement just before the start of the pollen season – so that you’ll get the best protection against pesky pollen.

Can you clean your cabin air filters?

It’s worth noting that some cabin air filters are manufactured to be able to be reusable – but these are very much in the minority. The vast majority of air filters have to have such fine pores in order to effectively catch enough particulate matter that they’re usually impossible to clean without very specialist equipment, or without damaging the mesh - and rendering the whole filter useless.

Get your filter replaced at your local Kwik Fit centre

While replacing a filter doesn’t seem like a big job, save yourself the headache of ordering the wrong parts or installing it incorrectly by getting the experts at your local Kwik Fit centre to take care of it. With a Full Service, we’ll replace your air filters, oil filters, oil, and much more.

Find out more about the benefits of servicing.