No AC or DC

That's Air Conditioning and Direct Current...does the band AC/DC actually stands for Alternating Current/Direct Current?

So Saturday night as I'm enjoying some quiet time before bed, so excited that Brandon is coming home from Brazil super early in the morning, I notice it feels a little warmer in the house than it usually is at that time of night. I don't think anything of it and go to bed. I have got to have my house at like 68-70 degrees to get a decent night's sleep. I wake up at like 1 in the morning and am sweltering, check the thermostat, and it's set right, but it is 80 degrees. Awesome, the AC is broken and we're in the hottest summer on record, 100+ degree days as far as the forecast can see.

On Sunday we check the coils just to be sure it isn't another Freon leak like it has been the last two times the AC went out. Coils are fine. We make it through Sunday without sweating too bad since we have two units, one to cool upstairs and one to cool downstairs. The other unit is compensating and with the fans on in the house, it stayed about 77, which is bearable.

My thought: lets just call someone in the morning, we'll survive.

Brandon's thought: I can fix this! Didn't I ever tell you if I didn't do IT I would have done HVAC, there's money there!

My thought: Oh boy....well, 2 other people we know have ACs that just went out and I know it isn't a freon leak which we couldn't fix ourselves anyway...I guess I'll let him try.

It was with some reluctance, but I did step back and let Brandon give it a whirl. Now you gotta know, when Brandon gets it in his head to do something, he is super persistent. Like so much so he will sacrifice sleep, and it basically haunts his every thought until he accomplishes his goal. That can be great, but it's really not necessary to stay up til 11:00 at night on a Sunday to diagnose an AC issue.

Truth be told, he did figure it out that it was a busted capacitor and he stayed home from work on Monday to install a new capacitor..which he had already done before the kids and I even got up. Now there's some dedication. The catch is he wound up blowing a fuse that took the rest of the day to figure out why the thermostat wouldn't come on even though the new capacitor was working.

So 43 dollars later, I admit, my husband fixed the air conditioner. Kudos to you Bran Bran!

And just because I am a little geeky, here's a little information on capacitors. A capacitor is basically a primitive battery. It has two plates separated by a certain distance. A charge gathers on one plate and at a certain capacity, the charge will jump to the other plate and release the energy. The capacitor in the AC system is a little smaller than a soda can. It is used to basically jump start the fan on the condenser system (that's the unit outside your house) when the thermostat tells the AC to turn on. It works very much like the battery in your car to jump start the engine.

The first indicator the capacitor was bad is that Brandon could hear the condenser fan motor receiving energy, and if he gave the fan a push with a stick through the grate, it would run with no problem. The second indicator was the capacitor itself, when it's "blown" it actually appears to have "exploded" from the inside, there is some bulging on the top or sides, and in some cases a leakage of fluid. Ours was just bubbled up on the top and the terminals on top were no longer exactly perpendicular.

And just in case you are curious, the reason we knew it was unlikely to be a Freon leak is that almost always once the volume of Freon reaches a certain level, it doesn't move through the system like it should without the pressure and the condenser will get very very cold and ice over from condensation. Last summer we had two Freon leaks and the condenser was covered in ice both times.

Hopefully you don't have your AC go out in such horrendous weather, but in case you do, maybe this will help you do some self diagnosis before spending hundreds on an AC repair man!