Woke up this morning, and the thermostat was saying 78, the outdoor compressor installation was hot and its fan wasn’t going; the vents were blowing warm air…
And it’s a Friday.
And it’s August. Temperature forecast for today, 98 degrees, much the same over the weekend. I don’t function well above 72.
Not happy campers here.
We have called the excellent company which did our heater installation. They are going to get somebody out here today.
I have a small hope this can be fixed with a compressor fan instead of a compressor replacement. But on a Friday?
I guess this calls for a basement camping trip, huh?
It may, if it gets gruesome.
One thing I need to do is turn out the lights on the marine tank. It shouldn’t get over 80, or things start to die.
I can float ice in it to keep it cool.
Had almost the same issue two days ago. It turned out that the compressor starter capacitor had gone bad. Tech came out, went directly to the part, replaced it in 10 minutes, and did a check of the system. He said the newer capacitors usually fail in the summer, and don’t last that long (5 yrs or so). Hopefully your fix will be as simple. Good luck!
Kroyd/Kevin had the same issue a couple days ago. In this case, it was the compressor starter capacitor had gone bad. 10 minutes to replace and tech said new ones go bad usually in the heat of the summer and only last about 5 years 🙁
Hopefully that’s all that’s wrong with yours or another simple fix!
We have a cheap window AC since one of the bedrooms gets hotter than other parts of the house. It, and a few fans, sure came in handy when our central air went out a few years ago. It was only a couple hundred dollars, if I recall.
Is this central air, or a window or through-wall unit? The big ones I can’t speak adequately about, but the smaller ones, when the moving parts give up or the compressor loses charge, it’s usually cheaper to bite the bullet and buy a new one. Because the compressor is hot, it sounds like the compressor or its drive may have seized up, in which case, stick a fork in it, it’s done.
It may be worthwhile to acquire small window units for bedrooms and work areas, so you can at least sleep and write in some semblance of comfort until the big ‘un is repaired or replaced.
This is central air. And we have storm windows. But we do have, 8 years old, one rollabout unit that we had from the apartment.
The problem is Jane’s car, which does not have its battery charged, is in front of it, and I’m not sure the ac’s got much go-juice left even if we do charge Jane’s car to get moved to get at the ac rollabout…Murphy’s law, eh?
So far it’s not too bad. If it gets really bad we could go to the basement, which is always cooler. Or try to fire up the old unit.
I think we will go out to eat 5ish, granted the AC guys get here and do something (I hope I hope I hope) before then. This is one of those days.
Jane agonized over spending a bit to replace the mimosa she so wants, which died, and she had splurged and ordered it, and it arrived today, broken in half. UPS must have really slammed the box it was in with something really heavy.
We finally, after 2 months of trying, managed to get ourselves and our coach Joan on the same date, same time, to meet for lunch, and now it’s very possible they’ll be fixing our ac come Monday…so we need to call Joan and say it’s one more glitch in that program.
Move the small a/c unit into the biggest room it will adequately cool and camp out there with lots of iced tea and your laptops until the central is repaired! Kittehs say “OH boy! Slumber party!!”
Conflicting schedules are the bane of everyone’s existence.
The halfway silver lining to Jane’s destroyed mimosa is that she can decide if she wants to cancel the order now and get her money back. Otherwise, BOOO! on UPS.
Re: UPS, I once ordered a precision electronic instrument for my amateur radio station. When the UPS delivery guy came, he rang the doorbell, I came to the door and asked him to wait a second so I could unlock the door (which had a double-cylinder lock). He couldn’t be bothered, so he went back to his truck, and when I got the door open, he tossed it over the fence toward me – a distance of about 12 feet. Electronic instruments don’t like to be jolted like that, and I complained. His response? “File a claim if it’s broken.” what a jerk….I don’t know if you could find out where and when this happened to the mimosa, but I’d be sending a nasty note to UPS that when a box is marked “FRAGILE! Live Plants”, it’s not supposed to be used to support that 200 pound package of lead ingots that someone ordered.
It’s quite strange. It came in a 5′ x 6″x6″ box, and is snapped off about 8″ from the top. Yet the box doesn’t look to have been flattened. I think it was one lead ingot, close to the top.
Our heat and air guys rock.
Hurliman. Spokane. Got ’em off Angie’s List when we needed a new furnace, and they’re gems.
Called them this morning. The guy shows at 4pm, says it’s a capacitor and the fan, and he called a distributor and is on the way to pick it up and fix it, for fairly little funds. We asked re economy of a new unit, and word is, it’s good for another few years.
We are going to have cool air before a couple of hours are up.On Friday evening.
What about your heat and air guys’ rock? Is it gneiss? 😉
IIRC, the term of art for lead is a pig. And 200 lbs. is about 3 pigs at 65 lbs. each. I have two my father got for ballast in my garage, as a parking bumper. (I back in.) So far, no piglets.
Good to hear your suffering will be short.
They were very gneiss! And quick!
good, we sometimes take air conditioning for granite…… (insert groan).
Excellent. You will be chillin’ shortly! I had a DUH! moment — of course the compressor is hot because it’s doing the heat exchange, and probably even hotter because the fruits of its labor (cool air) weren’t being distributed by the fan. Also very good that it doesn’t look to break the bank.
OH! Only the air conditioning. I thought you meant the electricity! :O We had some lightning, not close enough to hear thunder, just lightup the clouds. Initially seemed likely you could have had a lightning strike that took down your power.
You have my complete sympathy. My compressor remains untouched, and will, probably until next spring, as soon as budget permits. I do NOT want to go through a third(!!) summer like this.
It is MOST gratifying to know your compressor is good to go again and cooling commenceth with haste, forsooth.
(We had most welcome relief, good rain, a couple of days ago, then last night and this morning. This has helped a great deal.)
Creative writing, fairly productive, and some other creative stuff, going on here. With some luck, two updated vector graphics programs might do what I need, if one is still not too buggy and I can learn both quicker. I have some hope for this.
It feels like I might be near to getting over a writing hurdle, another little plateau. I am so self-critical, that internal editor, and although I can tell when I think someone else is a good writer (storyteller), I have real trouble telling if, ahem, anybody else would like my story-writing. So if I am about to overcome another lesson on the way to being a real writer, I’ll be very happy with myself; possibly unbearable for extended periods. Or at least semi-colons…. 😉