Every heating and cooling professional that I had ever spoken to told me the same thing.
Have your heating and A/C tune-ups done at the right time, and for furnaces, this is in the fall before the cold winter comes and for the cooling systems this is in the spring before the hot summer months. The last thing you want is to be without heat in the winter or without air conditioning in the summer! No matter how it happens, one thing is for sure and that is that it would be a miserable experience. I think this from unluckily having to live through it firsthand. Just a handful of years ago I was taking way too long to have our furnace maintained before the winter came. I just actually did not have the money at the time and the whole system of having the heating and air conditioning professional come out to take a look at it just seems like such a hassle, simply put, I just did not want to do it. So I put it off again and again and again, but until it was too late, you can entirely think what happened next. All it took was one major cold winter storm and our furnace went out. The result was an emergency heating and air conditioning repair that cost me way more than if I had just had it tuned up like I had planned to, but ever since then I have been doing fairly well at keeping to a schedule when it comes to having our heating and A/C system tuned up and service. Except for this year, I’ve just been occupied with so many other projects that I am running behind and I think that I need to hurry and schedule the maintenance if I do not want to repeat what happened 2 years ago.