Issue #021 | Facility Insight
Most K-12 teams change filters three times a year, and all three are timed to an empty building: at the end of summer cleaning, about a week before doors open; over winter break; and over spring break. You run them on breaks for a reason — you can shut a unit down without a soul around to notice.
But the three aren't equal. Winter and spring break come with slack. If a filter shows up the wrong size, or the order's short, you've got the rest of the break to sort it out before anyone's back in the building. The end-of-summer change — the one landing right about now — doesn't have that cushion. It sits on the one deadline in the building's whole year you can't move: opening day. And the thing most likely to blow that deadline isn't the change itself. It's the order.
The order is the deadline — so treat it that way.
The physical swap is the easy part; a crew can change filters across a building in a day or two. What can't be compressed is a filter that isn't in the building yet, or one that showed up in the wrong size. When an order arrives three days before doors open with two wrong sizes and a short count, it stops being an order and becomes an emergency — and there's no slack left to absorb it. Every hard part of the end-of-summer change traces back to when the order went in.
Place the order six weeks before the change week — every change, not just this one.
Whoever owns the ordering — Lead Custodian or Operations Supervisor — should have the order placed a full six weeks ahead of the week you plan to change filters. That buffer isn't padding. It does two specific jobs. First, it absorbs delivery delays, which are normal and outside your control. Second — and this is the part teams skip — it gives your staff time to open the boxes and actually check the order against what the building needs: right sizes, right quantities, right ratings, unit by unit. Catch a wrong size or a short count six weeks out and it's a phone call and a re-order. Catch it the week before opening and it's a problem you can't fix in time. Six weeks is what turns "the order's wrong" from a crisis into an errand.
Check the delivery the day it lands, not the day you install.
The buffer only works if someone uses it. When filters arrive, open them and verify against your equipment list right then — before they get stacked in a closet and forgotten until change week. Confirm sizes and ratings match each unit, confirm the count covers the whole building, and flag any discrepancy the same day so there's still runway to correct it. Then stage what's verified by zone, in the order you'll walk it, so change week is just installation and not a scavenger hunt.
Run the change as the capstone of summer, after the dirty work.
Sequence matters as much as timing. The end-of-summer change should come after floor stripping, refinishing, and deep cleaning are done — not before. Change filters too early in the summer and they spend the last weeks catching construction and cleaning dust, so the building opens on filters that are already partway loaded. Done last, as the final step before doors open, the building starts the year on genuinely clean filters. That's the entire point of doing it a week out instead of in July.
Log it the same way every time.
Close the loop with a record: unit ID, filter size and MERV rating, date changed, who did it. Keep the format identical across all three changes so the log actually accumulates into something useful — a document you can hand an administrator if an air-quality question comes up mid-year, and the reference that tells you the next change is due. The log is also where you'll confirm, come spring, that every unit actually got done and nothing got skipped in the opening-week rush.
The bigger picture — the next one is already on the clock.
Three changes a year, and only one of them can't slip — but the discipline that saves the summer change is the same one that keeps the other two easy. The next change is winter break, which means, by the six-week rule, the order should go in around early November. Put it on the calendar now, while the memory of any summer scramble is still fresh, and winter becomes the change nobody has to think about. The teams that get caught every year aren't careless — they just treat the order as a change-week task instead of what it actually is: the first and most important step, six weeks earlier.
Free for subscribers: the Classroom Deep Clean Checklist — a print-ready sheet for any room, on the same 1–5 condition-rating and sign-off system. Download it here →
Talk soon,
Daniel Mendoza
Facility Insight
P.S. If your team doesn't run the same filter-change log and order-check on every unit, the Checklist Bundle includes both, built to print — so the order gets verified on delivery and the record holds up when someone asks about it mid-year. See it here →l