If you’re a homeowner, you’ve surely considered with dread the possibility of your central heating and air system going down. Or perhaps you’ve already encountered this more-than-inconvenient situation.
Indeed, a broken air conditioner is a hassle, and it can ultimately be extremely expensive. If you hire a contractor to fix the issue, you have to be sure to get the right one. Otherwise, things either won’t get fixed or they’ll cost you an arm and a leg. A good contractor can be found at www.reliablestandard.com. If you’re a do-it-yourselfer (or at least aspiring to be one), then this article is for you. As it turns out, there are several extremely doable steps that you can knock out right away before taking the plunge of hiring a professional.
Air Conditioner Repair Tips That You Can Do Yourself
Check your circuit breaker
The absolute first thing you must do – before passing ‘Go’, and before collecting $200 – is check your circuit breaker. The last thing you want to happen is to pay for a professional to come to your house to fix a terrible problem, only to watch them stroll to your breaker, flip a switch, and fix everything. They’ll laugh at you as you write a check for their trouble, too.
Especially if you have several appliances and other things on the same breaker, the entire thing could trip and cause your air conditioner to stop working.
Change your filter
This should be a regular maintenance item on your household chores list anyways, but if it isn’t, use this as your warning before things stop working entirely. Consistently changing your filter is an easy and relatively inexpensive thing to do, and not only will it help with the quality of air in your home, but it could prevent a complete breakdown, too.
Look at your thermostat
Believe it or not, dead batteries in your thermostat could be the reason that your unit stopped functioning. There’s also the possibility that the settings were messed up, so check that, too.
Melt ice and clean the air conditioning unit
Check out the actual air conditioning unit itself. If there’s any ice on it at all, make sure to melt it by turning the system off (except for the fan) or turning everything off and letting it melt on its own.
Then, be sure to give the unit a solid cleaning. It should be pretty easy to clean the fan blades and remove debris from in or around the unit. Be sure the unit is off, of course, and then go about cleaning the blades as well as the condenser fins, which are easily breakable. Use caution throughout this entire process.
Examine air ducts
This is the one suggestion that will actually take a bit of leg-work. Or, ladder-work, as it were.
Go ahead and climb up into your attic and make sure that your home’s air ducts have air flowing out of them. If there’s dirty enough to block airflow, be sure to clean them and it might just solve your problem. There’s also a chance that a vent was closed, which could also be an issue.
Final Thoughts
The above are generally simple tips for you to do an all-around maintenance check and troubleshoot your air conditioning system that might be on the fritz.
If none of the above solves the problem, you might want to consider calling a professional. Just be sure to your research first so that you don’t end up paying too much for something that should have been a simple fix.
