AC Repair in Little Elm

Little Elm gets its freezing nights in stretches rather than in a season of them, and the cooling side is what carries the year.

Almost every call here comes back to the outdoor unit, because the cooling side is the half that gets used. Run hours wear out a compressor, a contactor and an outdoor fan motor, so summers worked says more about a compressor than the year on the data plate does: a system installed in 2011 that has cooled through every summer since has more behind it than the install date alone shows. Where the outdoor unit heats the house too, as a heat pump does, no part of the year gives it a rest.

The outdoor coil carries more weight here than in a cooler place. Cooling works by dumping heat outside, and on the hottest afternoons of the year there is less cool air to dump it into; a coil packed with cottonwood seed, grass clippings or dryer lint takes away what little margin is left. A system that coped in June and quits in August is often reporting the coil, not the compressor.

The summers here are humid rather than tropical, so the AC does both halves of the job at once — temperature, and the water in the air. Neither half leads, which is why the complaint itself is worth saying precisely on the phone. A house that gets down to the set temperature and still feels damp is reporting the water half: the charge, the amount of air crossing the coil, or a system that satisfies the thermostat before it has dried anything. A house that never reaches the set temperature at all on a hot afternoon is reporting capacity, and a technician goes after that with a different set of checks. Indoors the two sound like one complaint; at the coil they separate.

The filter is the one thing on the shelf that genuinely belongs to this fault, and being fair about it costs nothing: a filter gone gray stops enough air to freeze a coil, it is the first thing a technician checks for exactly that reason, and a system that iced up because of one wants it changed before anything else. A new filter reaches none of what sits on the other side of it: a charge that has leaked away, a capacitor that has drifted, an outdoor coil packed solid, a blower wheel silted up blade by blade. Nor does it clear the ice already on the coil, which needs the cooling off, the fan on and several hours. A system that froze with a clean filter in it has already ruled the filter out, and that is worth saying on the phone.

The can of refrigerant with sealant in it is the one to leave on the shelf. The sealant is made to harden where it meets air, and inside a system it hardens in the metering device, the filter drier and the recovery equipment — and it does not come back out of a recovery machine, which is why a system that has had it is a harder system to get worked on. Nothing on a can's gauge separates a low charge from a dirty coil, a blocked filter or a restricted metering device, and all four read low on the same needle. A technician weighs the charge in against a measurement instead of adding it until the air feels colder. Refrigerant for a home system is not a retail purchase either: EPA rules restrict the sale of it to certified technicians, and what has turned up on the shelf as a drop-in for R-22 has at times been a flammable hydrocarbon blend.

The hard-start kit is not a gimmick, and it does a real job — it adds torque for the half-second a compressor needs to break away, and a technician fits one on purpose. It diagnoses nothing. A compressor that started without help last summer and needs help this one has changed, and the kit lets it go on starting while whatever changed carries on. Fitted after a measurement it buys time deliberately; fitted instead of one, it hides the reading that would have said how much time there is.