I need your advice on split air conditioner
troubleshooting. A split AC is just as likely as any other
AC to have a refrigerant leak. As the refrigerant leaks out, it may literally
freeze on the coils, bubble and pop as it tries to run with less refrigerant or run
for hours to hardly make a difference. I already looked for something obvious like
bubbling water on the surface of the air conditioner, both the internal coils and external ones,
but I do not see it. Split coil air conditioners can be useful
in letting you have multi-zone air conditioning, with a different coil in each room running
off the main unit. You therefore have multiple places that the
cold air could leak out or electrical connections could short. What else can I check? If there is not air coming out of the interior
unit, check to see if the fan on the outside is running. If neither is, check the breaker for the AC
to make sure it is not tripped. That’s at least an easy thing to check. If the breaker is not the problem, my next
guess is the control panel or the wires between the thermostat and air handler.
That’s where you were saying the wires might
be the problem. Yeah, whether water corroded it or a squirrel
chewed through it, I do not know. The fried squirrel is at least obvious. You can try resetting the control board, but
if that does not work, resetting the breaker is the same as rebooting the control board. If that fails and the control board still
errors out, you need a tech to replace the control board. At least then I’ve tried the two things
they’d charge me two hundred dollars to do. If the blower is running but the fan for the
exterior unit isn’t, you need to check the outside unit. That could be the blower motor – Which is obvious by its silence or the really
loud noises it makes before it dies. Or it could be the run capacitor, which a
starter cap kit could fix for you. Or it may be the control board. And flipping a few switches may or may not
reboot that. If the unit has power but is not turning on,
you could check the thermostat.
It is set just above frozen. The thermostat itself may be broken. I cannot fix that. If the compressor starts but the fan does
not kick in, the condenser fan motor needs to be fixed if the wires are not corroded. If the condenser fan comes on but the compressor
does not, the compressor is the problem. It may not come on because it is broken or
may not run because it senses there’s no refrigerant. I know it is not cool to say this, but you
need to pay a pro to recharge the refrigerant, no matter how big a hole that burns in your
wallet..
