I have had capacitors go out on a few of the units in my house over the years, most of the time when ants or spiders get into the contacts area and cause a short. I would say out of all the times the AC has gone out, 90% of the time it was the capaciter. Sounds like you did a great job, and got lots of help from CF.....Good work everyone ! DD
This thread jinxed me. My a/c went out while I was sleeping. Woke up hot as hell and couldn't get back to sleep. Outside unit is not cutting on. Bad capacitor. Back up now several hours later a little lighter in the wallet. But, I called it. Argh!
I've always wondered why no one uses water cooling for the heat exchanger. You would still have water pumps that fail instead of blowers, but it should be more efficient. You could even preheat water before it goes to the water heater. Add a cistern and you would probably use very little water in total.
Did you fix it yourself or call someone out I had to have freon added to my system at the end of last summer. The repair guy did it for free, he said he wanted future business since the compressor was probably only good for another year. Builders used crappy ones my ac has been running non stop lately. It crapping out is always in the back of my mind. I have one unit in two zones. The thing is barely keeping up
Your coils are probably dirty. Possibly low on freon depending on how big your leak is. (remember freon is not like fuel, so theoretically you should never have to add more unless you have a leak)
I rinse the coils off with a hose fairly regularly so I don't think they are dirty is there an easy way to detect a freon leak?
The electronic testers are costly and you can do a pressure test as well. I had a leak recently and it was in the evaporator coil and had to replace it.
I may be interchanging the terms coil and compressor. I rinse the outside unit that has radiator type blades. The part he thought wouldn't last was about $1000 to replace
I called someone out. The capacitor being the problem was a guess without actually looking at it just going from the symptoms: outside unit not running and a low level humming noise. It could have been something else but as soon as we looked at the dual capacitor...it had a bubble on top of it so it was obviously bad. I just didn't want to take any chances trying to do it myself in this case...because if I don't diagnose it right or fix it properly...then I'm delaying having a/c again and possibly in for another hot night. It was a $300 job for a $30 part basically. It's a rip-off but that's how that service **** rolls. They jack the price up 10 times on the part basically. Telling me the part is $250. Right... .
