Before You Shut Your AC Down This Fall, Do This (Or Pay for It Next Spring)
If your central AC is sitting quiet in the backyard right now, stop for sixty seconds. What you do in the next twenty minutes this fall decides whether that system fires right up next May, or hits you with a fifteen hundred dollar compressor bill. Last May in Katy, Texas, a homeowner flipped his thermostat to cool for the first time, heard a loud buzz from outside, then nothing. The tech opened the condenser, found a mouse nest, two chewed thermostat wires, and a compressor that tried to start dry after the breaker was off all winter. Final damage? Thirty eight hundred dollars for a new condenser on a ten year old R-410A system. And the painful part is he caused all of it back in October without knowing it. Every spring, HVAC techs from Texas to Florida to Ohio roll up to dead condensers, chewed wires, rusted coils, and seized compressors. And nine times out of ten, the homeowner caused it back in the fall without even knowing it. Here is the scary part. You will not feel it now. Your ...