A rare find, powerful
Yesterday I had something happen to me that rarely happens in SW Florida, a positive experience with a service company!! I left work early as I was told a tech would be at my house between 2 and 4. Over the last 6 years here I have had been told someone would be out between time X and Y and much more often than not they arrived well after that window, if they arrived at all. Well the house was a toasty 87 degrees when I got home so I hoped this time would be different.
You can imagine my surprise when I got a call at 3 o’clock from their main office saying a tech was on their way. Oh my God, a call to say they were going to arrive on time??? This is unheard of!! The guy pulled up to the driveway about 3:30. His name was Chris and I could immediately tell he was not typical of the service industry I have been exposed to so far in Florida. He was polite and english was his first language. Instead of acting bothered by my explanation of the problem, he actually listened and used the info to start the troubleshooting.
From my description of the problem he was pretty sure that my coils were frozen over, which they were, solid. So while he let the ice melt, he did some maintenance by attaching his shop vac to the drip outlet for the unit outside. I told him that I occasionally put some bleach into the system by the air handler as I was told to do. However once he had the unit apart I realized that what I was doing did absolutely nothing. Through some shoddy installation, the air handler unit had a slight backwards tilt, away from the drain in the front, so any bleach I was sticking in was just sitting there. I need to add the bleach to the outside drip pipe.
So to assist in the ice melting I turned on the fan blower to suck more of the warm outside air in. The tech got out his blow torch and melted the rest, it probably took a half hour to get it all out. Now he had to figure out why it froze up. He said that the main reasons for a unit to freeze up was either low freon or a dirty, clogged air filter. I told him that we changed the air filter religiously every 3 months so I doubted that would be the issue. He check the freon levels and they were fine, hmmm.
He inspected our air filter and said it didn’t look clogged. He put the cover back on and we fired it up. I went inside and felt the vents and told him it was still blowing very weakly and I still heard the chugging noise. The tech was baffled. He said we obviously have an air obstruction somewhere. So he hopped up into the attic and inspected the duct from the air return to see if it was collapsed in any way, nope looks fine. Then he decided to open the unit back up and take a look underneath. At first glance he saw nothing, however when he hit it with a flashlight he saw the problem, the portion of the duct that comes down the wall and then turns up and under the air handler was FILLED with water. He hypothesized that poor drainage had caused water to slowly drip into the duct down below, filling it over time to the point where it now choked off air flow. He used his shop vac to pull out 35 to 40 gallons of water! He put it all back together, I fired it up and viola, back to normal!
I was relieved that no parts had to be replaced and he said that our unit apears to be in good shape otherwise. He did spend 2 and a half hours there which set us back a couple hundred bucks, but that is much less than I was fearing it would cost. I really appreciated his good natured, professional demeanor during the call and writing the check didn’t bother me at all. It makes such a difference when someone actually makes the effort to treat a customer as they would want to be treated.
Since I observed the entire process, I learned a lot about my AC system and there was nothing that he did, short of measuring the freon pressure, that I couldn’t have done myself. So if I run into issues in the future at least I have a game plan to diagnose it a bit. I need to make sure I keep that drain as clear as possible.
Our one neighbor sent me a link to this clip of a commentary Keith Olbermann gave on the 9/11 five year anniversary and how an event that unified the country in a way that hadn’t been seen in decades has mutated into something that now polarizes and breaks down our country. He RIPS the Bush administration in a way so powerful, so well thought out and so well communicated it is just compelling to view. If you have a spare nine minutes, take it and watch this. I have no idea how anyone can still be supporting Bush, unless they are greedy bastards that are concerned with nothing more than what is inside their white picket fence.