Keeping The Dog from “Visiting” Your Central AC Condenser And Other Tips From Your AC Repair Company | Fort Worth, TX
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We’re One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating of Fort Worth, TX, the AC repair company that puts our knowledge and experience to work for you. Our team of professionals helps you stay on top of your cooling system’s needs, focusing on preventive maintenance and anticipation of your repair needs through scheduled visits and intelligently stocked vehicles. We’d like to share some of our experience with you, and we look forward to providing you with a fast response if you experience summer cooling system downtime, along with expert maintenance in the off-season.
Even If You Don’t See Them Do It, the Evidence Is There
Corrosion on the corner of your central AC system’s condenser unit can indicate a problem that will eventually cause coil damage and refrigerant leaks. Our AC repair company team has seen everything, so you may hear other stories about what can happen to your outdoor AC unit besides this one. The cost of refrigerant and replacing or repairing the coil can add up, so it’s worth finding a solution to whatever is visiting and leaving corrosive liquids on your system. Clue: this is probably the same problem that causes damage to neighborhood fire hydrants and telephone poles. Using a small barrier around your condenser unit in your yards such as a low fence, or a scent repellent, can keep four-legged HVAC saboteurs from marking your system.
The Fluffy Gray Cat of Inefficiency
Speaking of dogs, some HVAC techs say when they go to change an air filter that’s overdue for a change, it looks like someone has left a fluffy gray cat on it. It’s amazing how many filters are like that, considering how important they are for your AC system’s survival. By the way, if your filters get clogged quickly, changing them more often is a good solution and good for your system as well. It helps with reliability, efficiency, and of course, the system’s ability to keep you cool. Your Fort Worth, TX AC repair company can establish a personalized replacement schedule for you.
Other Maintenance Items That Guide Our Team to Serve You Better
When our AC repair company technicians are performing maintenance on your cooling system, they’re usually doing a lot of cleaning, because that’s what keeps your system in top shape. Both the indoor and outdoor gear get exposed to various natural sources of contamination, on the outside from the weather and nature, inside from moisture and microorganisms. While they’re doing that cleaning, though, they’re also checking your system for signs of wear, such as motors that don’t turn freely or buzz instead of starting the first time, compressors showing signs of age, and contractors that don’t operate reliably. These are signs of potential summer repairs, and worth considering as off-season repairs instead. Our top-quality techs can help you stay ahead of your system, making all your neighbors wonder why, when one of those infamous “heat domes” keeps us in triple digits for days or weeks, you’re relaxing and smiling instead of waiting anxiously for the HVAC repair van. You just didn’t wait until stress on your system revealed the issues, you took care of them when your maintenance team caught them.
The Benefit of AC Repair Company Experience
Add up the daily schedule of visits and the years of experience, and our team of HVAC technicians has seen a lot of cooling systems. They develop a feeling for what kinds of issues tend to arise on your system at each point in its lifetime, from how often the filter needs changing in a typical home versus a pet-lover’s house when your fan motors and capacitors are likely to need replacing, your belt and hose replacement schedule, compressor lifetime, coil aging, and of course your duct cleaning needs. Many of these items are also on the manufacturer’s maintenance schedules, giving our Fort Worth, TX AC repair company techs a guideline even on newer units we haven’t developed extensive personal experience with yet. Our experience can help with preventive maintenance and repairs, and it can also provide a guide to budgeting for future system repairs and planning for upgrades. It also helps us stock the right parts for most common repair jobs in our vehicles, for faster service. Our AC repair company team is a great source of information, as well as a skilled group of experts.
Testing Can Uncover AC System Problems for Informed Repairs
From the compressor to the fan motors, electrical issues indoors and out, coil and refrigerant status, and much more, our AC repair company team has the equipment to do the numbers on many of your system’s components, potentially indicating which items need repair or replacement, or confirming our technician’s suspicions. This, combined with extensive experience, helps us target repairs and look for signs of trouble that aren’t always obvious: for example, a fan motor that’s drawing more current may be telling us that it’s getting tired even before it fails. Of course, visible signs of trouble to come such as cracking hoses and glazed or cracked belts are simple clues that provide easy opportunities to avoid downtime in the future. We want you to sail through the summer with cool air and comfort.
Condenser Maintenance Can Get Messy
As a long-term resident of your yard, your cooling system’s condenser unit has seen a lot. Dog visits are just the beginning for these hardworking devices, expelling the heat from your home and keeping you cool in the summer, while subject to storms, landscaping debris, bumps from ladders stored nearby, invasion of small critters who think it’s a great winter home, and many other bumps, bruises, dirt, dust, and debris. When our AC repair company team comes to maintain your system, we usually spend a lot of our time on your outdoor unit, basically “detailing” it to recover from all that it’s been through in the off-season. The reward is reliability and efficiency, as we clean the moving parts and heat transfer components that work hard, and make sure the electrical components are in good shape to keep everything operating as needed when your thermostat says it’s time to cool down.
Condenser Cleaning and Small Animal Homes
It’s not unusual to find a nest of some sort inside your unit, as little creatures have ways of slipping in through pretty small spaces in your outdoor unit’s cover. They bring materials with them to build a nest, and sometimes find them inside as well, chewing on belts, hoses, wires, and other materials. It’s important to go in and clean everything out before starting your AC for the season, both for their sake and to keep from pulling the nest materials deeper into the works. While our AC repair company techs have the unit open, we’ll also be inspected to make sure the electrical gear is in good shape, with no signs of burnt or melted insulation on the wires, no black deposits on nearby material to indicate electrical problems like arcing and sparking from loose wires and vibration-related short circuits, and no oil leaking from the capacitor. On the condenser coil, we’ll straighten the fins, check the coil, and probably wash it all out to provide maximum efficiency for the summer ahead. Hopefully, there aren’t any leaks, but if there are problems or refrigerant loss, now’s the time to find them.
Things Homeowners Notice Can Help Us Recognize Issues, Especially Intermittent Ones
Sometimes a simple, objective observation about your cooling system’s operation can help our AC repair company technicians discover the root cause of a problem, especially if it’s one that only happens if the system runs in the nighttime or happens infrequently but is still a cause for concern. There are a lot of ways that cooling systems can malfunction giving clues that only AC repair company workers can decode, but anyone can notice, such as a certain type of squeak that happens intermittently or a buzzing sound that only happens in the morning. Combined with our skills of observation and diagnosis, these clues can help us get to work more quickly sometimes, which means you get cool faster, too. Here are some common issues that people call us about, as examples.
Warm Air from Vents When the AC Is Supposed to Be Running
If the air coming from the vents doesn’t get cool pretty quickly once the AC starts up, there could be a problem preventing the system from chilling the air. There are many things that could be causing this, but one in particular that surprises people is when the indoor portion of your air conditioning system has formed ice instead of cooling the air. One reason for that can be simply that warm air wasn’t flowing across it because of a blocked air filter. Your AC repair company technician in Fort Worth, TX can fix this problem, deicing carefully to protect the coils if needed, and make sure that everything related to the issue is taken care of as well so that you’ll have reliable cool air.
No Airflow at All or Slow Flow, But Outside Your AC System Seems to Be Making the Usual Sounds
Our AC repair company experts can approach this in several ways. Fan motors and belts are suspect, but what about your ducts? Are they clean or packed with material from years of system operation? And your air filter, of course, could be in need of changing and blocking the airflow. A systematic diagnosis by our AC repair company team will get to the root of whatever’s causing the airflow problem, and make sure it’s the only issue that’s affecting your system’s operation. For homes that have multiple zones, the diagnosis is a bit different because you’ll have separate fans and ducts for each zone.
On-Again, Off-Again, System Cycling More Frequently Than Usual
This is a very helpful bit of information for our AC repair company workers, even if it seems a bit odd. The diagnosis could be one or more of several possible causes, but knowing that the system is starting up and trying to work, then shutting down fairly quickly helps narrow down the issues. Chances are, at first you didn’t notice the problem but soon it got on your nerves as you became aware of your system’s irregular operation. Our Fort Worth, TX team will get to work and you’ll appreciate how your system once again starts up, spends a while cooling, then takes a break in a more leisurely pattern once the repairs are completed.
Humidity Issues Even When You’re Running AC
Air conditioning tends to dehumidify your air, that’s part of how it works. More powerful systems usually dehumidify rapidly, less powerful units not as much. That means when it’s very humid outside, your system may not have as much effect, but generally, a change in how your air feels might indicate an issue. If you have a humidification and dehumidification unit installed, that’s important information as well since it will be attempting to adjust the moisture in the air and may be having issues. Otherwise, our AC repair company techs will check to see what’s going on with your system that’s affecting your humidity. If you have a weather gauge that shows indoor humidity values, that information could help.
Water and Fluid Leaks, or Foul Smells Around Your AC
Blocked drains can lead to overflowing liquids, while the liquid that’s not draining is growing microorganisms and beginning to smell. Our AC repair company team cleans carefully during maintenance, so hopefully, this is a recent development. Other fluid leaks should be tended to quickly as well so that your unit’s operation is not affected.
One Hour Air Conditioning & Heating of Fort Worth Is Your Top Choice for HVAC System Care
Our AC repair company team serves the greater Fort Worth, TX area with fast response times and expert service so you can get cool quickly and at a reasonable cost. Give us a call for quick help or to schedule maintenance.