Kung Fu Maintenance demonstrates repairing a typical air conditioner. Cooling down an overheated compressor and replacing the capacitor and hard start kit.
Repairing Air Conditioner
Today I have got an overheated compressor. Went ahead and pulled my disconnect. Discharged the cap. Got a dangling capacitor there got a video on how to secure that. Make that better. I got ice on the compressor to cool it down and my suspicion is that it is the hard start kit that has gone out on this. I can see it pretty much discolored.
Already discharged my run cap but since I am here I am going to go ahead and replace the capacitor and the hard start kit all at the same time. Just loosen the strap up and I usually remove these just by slipping my screwdriver underneath the post. Slipping the lead off. I find the yellow one goes to one side and the blue and red on the other side for the capacitor for my particular units. Mostly just mimicking what is already there.
The capacitor is pretty hot. OK. Out with the old one and in with the new one. Again this one has got blue and red on one side and yellow on the other side. There we go. Tighten our strap down. And want to find a good place to clip this on. That’ll work there. Hard start kit. Good to go. Now we’ll fire it up. See if it turns on. Compressor is still pretty hot but hopefully all it takes was the ice on the top to cool it down. We’ll see here.
Going to turn this on. Get it going here. Here’s plugging in the disconnect back here. Aw yeah. Fired right up. Back in business. Cool things down again. Now I will just verify that the cold side line gets nice and chilly all the way. And it is it’s way cold already. I’ll stay with it for about five minutes. Make sure it stays nice and cold.
I was actually up here on the roof the other day and saw this unit and felt it and it was ice cold. So I knew today that it probably was my hard start kit or the capacitor that was just having trouble getting the compressor to start.
There’s some other things that could be worked out here. This has a different type of wiring cover and those wire leads actually could be changed to an angled wire lead more like the red one so that the cover can be put back on. That’s another story for another day.
It is brutally hot today so just getting it going and keeping everything going good for now. And it’s flashing nice and cold. So we’re good here.