What to Do when an Air Conditioning Unit Breaks Down in the Summer
First of all, keep your cool. I know, it is the air condition what is not working, and keeping cool is exactly what we can’t do, but succumb to despair doesn’t help. Stop a second and think ahead, imagine that the A/C unit will be broken for a while and provide your house with the means to be the coolest possible. Place fans in every room, included the ones that work in the windows. Keep the blinds and curtains down so the sun doesn’t hit inside the house, and clean everywhere throughfully. This is very important, because the heat discovers odors that the air condition was hiding, like the smell in the garbage cabinet or pet cages.
Before you give up to panic, remember to check your filter, if your unit uses the permanent kind of filters, clean it, if it is one of the disposable ones, change it. Still the bad boy is not cooling off? Time to panic. No, seriously, it is time now to call for help. First of all, make sure you have your homeowner warranty in current use. I figure it out how important is to have one; it is the best investment I made in years. When my unit broke down, I called them, and they sent a technician the same day. And I only had to pay 60.00 dollars for service fee. The homeowner was a savior, because dealing with the technicians and the repair of my A/C was an unhappy ordeal.
When the technician came was a Sunday, and he wasn’t in the best of the moods. Without even open the door of the inside part of the unit, he decided that we had a leak in the pipes of the coil frame. He had to change the whole part, and it will take a while, because the warranty company has to approve the purchase of any part, and of course, it won’t be in stock. So he will have to order it, and God knows how long that will take. The heat in the house and the news made me sweat so much that we could make an Olympic swimming pool in my living room. The technician filled the unit with Freon the gas that make it cool the pipes, and left us to rot in hell, because it didn’t work at all, the thermostat didn’t move from a stubborn 90 degrees.
I talked to the warranty company, begging them to accelerate the process all they could. I have to say that next day the technician came back with the part, and after three hours of hard work, he installed the new coil frame.
It took a wile, more than three hours, for the house to cool off, but after that, the thermostat came back to its senses and started to drop until it reached a decent temperature.
So, after all, I learned important things: Have a good current homeowner warranty, have plenty fans in stock, change or clean your A/C filters regularly and don’t panic. As my mother says: what the people did years ago when they didn’t have air condition, or even electricity to plug fans?
