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calendar   Sunday - May 31, 2015

Manual A/C

Arrgh, the joys of condo ownership.

Looks like the central air is sort of on the fritz again. But this time around, I thought about things, and I think I can fix it myself. Actually, I’ve half fixed it already. Sort of.

The air fan wasn’t turning in the compressor unit outside. No airflow means the expanded coolant didn’t cool off enough, and that means the A/C pretty much stopped working. In the middle of the night of course.  So we had no air for a day, and I put in a call to a HVAC guy who, naturally, didn’t call me back. So what am I supposed to do? It’s hot in here and we need to get to sleep in a few hours.

So I took my handy ViseGrips and unscrewed the top of the unit. And found the fan mounted upside down to the underside of the lid. Huh. Turn the power back on, give the fan blade a spin. Nothing. Bad motor? Turn the lid over, give the blade a spin, and it starts right up. Ah so, dirty bearing on the motor. Ok, I can’t see any oiler points on the motor chassis, but it’s getting dark. So I carefully slide the running motor and lid onto the coils and go inside. The fan keeps working, yay!!, and we have A/C. Enough to get us through the night. I set the thermostat to 50°, just to make sure the unit NEVER tripped off, and then had trouble starting again.

By morning the fan had stopped again, but it was comfortable in here. So I turned the A/C off, and we’re getting by. Other than the actual compressor, which appears to be fine, there are only 3 replaceable parts in an A/C unit - the motor, the start/run capacitor, and the contactor. A contactor is like a tiny solenoid powered gang switch. It’s one of those safety things you want to have inside. The capacitor sort of stores a bucket of extra electricity to dump into the motor when it needs to start up.  They do wear out; as soon as it stops raining I’m going to go take a look and see if this one is going bad.

Bottom line: a brand new motor is about $90-130, a new capacitor is about $45, and a new contactor is around $35. Sure, that adds up to $170-200, but that’s for a full “rebuild”, and is still less than the price of a service call. Odds are good that it’s just the capacitor. You can get all these parts from one of the universal supply companies like Grainger. YouTube has lots of How-To videos, and the internet has tons of pages on how A/C systems work. And of course, be smart with the electricity, because 240 volts can kill you.

And in the meantime I’ve got manual air conditioning, when the system is willing. Which is still better than no air conditioning at all. Lucky us it’s cool and overcast today. So far.

*************************************

Right. Quite a number of hours later, and we’re back here at the hacienda. The A/C still doesn’t completely start from the thermostat here on the wall, but if I go outside and give the lid of the compressor a shake (to which the fan motor is attached) then the fan comes on. Let’s see how long it runs this time. My guess is a bearing in the motor going bad; obviously the contactor is working, and just as obviously the capacitor is providing just about enough juice to get it started. Tomorrow I’ll examine the motor for some oiling points, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have them. So it’s time to hunt down an equivalent to an AO Smith MultiMotor and install it.

So for now we’ve got air. Good, because it’s a very humid evening. Everywhere else just got the short downpour; we only got a few drops. Very clammy out there.


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Posted by Drew458   United States  on 05/31/2015 at 07:19 AM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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