Ducane Air Conditioner Troubleshooting

I need your help with Ducane air conditioner
troubleshooting. First thing, make sure you actually turned
on the AC instead of flipping it from heat to neutral, and turned down the thermostat. It is set to cool, but it is not doing anything. For their control boards, when the red and
green LEDs are both off, the control panel is getting no power. So it may be a dead control board. Or something tripped the breaker for the AC. I cannot see how. If you’ve got a lot of garage power tools
in use while the AC is drawing power to start up, the breaker might have been tripped. Or something is wrong electrically and blew
the fuse. At least replacing the fuse is easy to do. If the thing is working normally, the lights
blink slowly together. If it has an anti-short cycle, they have an
alternating slow flash, red then green then red again. What is an anti-short cycle? It is not running because it thinks it will
short out, so it is locked out and shut down but smart enough to tell you why.

In which case, I need to either turn stuff
off to not max out the load, or replace fuses. If the thing has lights on but won’t come
on, the starting capacitor might be dead. If the compressor tries to kick in but cannot,
and all you have is a fan blowing, maybe you need a starter cap kit. Sometimes it runs but makes a lot of funny
noises. If it is sizzling and hissing, it is either
in defrost mode because it actually froze up, or there’s an electrical problem. What do you do if an AC freezes? Well it is too warm for an AC to actually
freeze, unless it was because you turned on the AC when you meant the heater, since they
freeze when it is below 60. A lot of Ducane ACs have a defrost unit to
melt that ice.

pexels photo 3807319

It was around 90 when I gave in and turned
it on. You may have a refrigerant leak, cooling the
air around the AC. If it is bad enough or the filters are clogged
to limit air flow, that’ll freeze the condensate your AC coils usually get. So if it is not working because there’s
an electrical problem beyond the breaker box, I need to call for HVAC repairs. If it has a refrigerant leak, I need an HVAC
guy if only to refill the refrigerant. And find the leak in the coils or valves and
seal that. Since they outlawed Freon, the high pressure
replacements to Freon are more prone to leak, and that’s assuming you’re not working
with an AC with ultra-thin coils. Ducane was not one of the companies getting
sued for coils so thin they were guaranteed to corrode through. I think that was Amana. Doesn’t mean the solution is not replacing
your coils too..

As found on YouTube

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