I Fixed It!

Yesterday afternoon, things started getting warm at my house.

I thought it might have been an afternoon of baking.  I made a couple of loaves of French bread and a pan of lasagna.  I even used the broiler in my oven to make some of the French bread into garlic bread.  So I thought that maybe the overuse of my oven might have been overpowering the air conditioning a little.  A little later, my wife was doing dishes and noticed that the vent by her feet (the one that usually feels so good on the feet on a hot day) wasn't blowing air that was very cold.

I went out and noticed that the fan on the A/C unit outside wasn't moving.  It was making a bit of a buzzing noise, but there was no movement.  I fiddled about with it a little bit, but didn't really know what to do.

I called the company that fixed our furnace a few months ago and left a message.  This morning, I made an appointment for a technician to come out and fix whatever was wrong.  We needed it fixed quickly because the weather forecast for the next four days predicted temperatures just north of 100 degrees.  Yuck.

I also posted something on Facebook about our air conditioning woes.  Fortunately, one of the guys in my neighborhood had a similar problem and he told me how he fixed it for only the price of a part.

So I decided to check it out.  Air conditioners have a big compressor, heat exchange unit (like a radiator on a car) and a large fan in the outdoors part of the system.  Both the compressor and the fan rely on a capacitor (kind of like a mini battery) to get them started.  I took the capacitor off and realized right away that it was bad.  It had bulges on the top and bottom and a little yellowish oil had leaked out.  I used my multimeter to measure the capacitance across both capacitors (it's a dual capacitor) and both readings were zero.  That was definitely the problem.

It took a little while to track down a part, but once I had the part, I installed it and started up the system and the cold air started pouring out of the vents.  SUCCESS!

It was a little bit of a gamble, because I had already called the HVAC company and told them I didn't need the technician to come out after all.  If I had been wrong, we would have spent a rather warm night tonight.  But the gamble paid off.  For just over $30 and a couple of hours of running around, I was able to fix the problem.  The HVAC company would have charged me a LOT more than that.

It feels good to fix something myself.