Five Most Common HVAC Problems

All right today I wanted to go over the five most common problems with HVAC air conditioners.

Say you go to turn you’re air conditioner or heater on
on cool or heat and auto and you lower your temperature down
and let’s say nothing happens. The unit doesn’t turn on the blower doesn’t turn on at all first thing you want to check is the breakers.

It could be a tripped breaker. You often have a breaker for the condenser
and then a breaker for the fan itself this one is right here
for the fan. So make sure your breakers are not tripped. Sometimes if they’re tripped they will trip halfway and when you reset it you need to turn the breaker all the way off and then turn the breaker all the way back on.

Next thing to check is the door switch often there is a service door switch on the air conditioner heater unit it’s usually located right here (top left side of the air handler) what you want to do is push on this left side to see if that will engage that switch. So if you got it on heat or cool and auto already. A lot of times that will be the problem.

Sometimes you might need to add a screw. Like this one a
screws been added to make sure that it is held in place.
Or you can tape the door shut. If you do add a screw you want to make sure that that screw isn’t going to be penetrating into anything.
Like any tubing or anything like that such as any refrigerant tubing behind it you want to make sure you pick a place that is good and you don’t want a screw that is too long you don’t want it to poke into anything that it’s not supposed to.

Ok the number three most common problem with air conditioners. So one we had a breaker tripped, two, the service door switch.

The third most often cause of an air conditioner not working is inside here if this hatch comes open. Sometimes let’s say it wasn’t secured properly it’s got this like a mailbox latch that latches the door into place and if that came open and this hatch falls open a lot of times what happens is your evaporator coil will freeze up into a block of ice.

So while you are there you got your filter and your filter make sure you have good air flow that a lot of times what will happen is that will
turn to a block of ice and you won’t even be able to pull the air filter off of it.

What you want to do is come over here to your thermostat and just turn
the cool side off and just turn just the house fan on so turn the fan on on and put the switch here on off that way you can defrost the air conditioner and you also kind of want to watch it to make sure your condensation line doesn’t overflow.

It could get built up with too much water from the ice melting. So something to keep an eye on there but keeping the fan on will help melt the ice faster and dry everything out.

You know get back to normal. It takes a little while and than you’ll be able to put it to cool and auto again and you’ll close this door and again if you need to you will add a screw or you can add some tape to make sure that its held in place and doesn’t come open on you again.

Number four most common problem with HVAC heaters and air conditioners is a fan motor that won’t start. Often you can just replace
the fan start capacitor.

I have a video showing you how to do that, “First Thing To Try”
“Before” you just run out and replace the “Motor” is to try “Replacing”
the fan start capacitor and it’s not truly a start cap it is actually a run cap but replacing that capacitor that capacitor helps get the fan started going
and gives it that initial kick to start. Without that it can’t start it will just
sit there and hum and sometimes you can even push start it with a pen or something. You know “very carefully”.

And the fifth most common cause of losing your heating or air conditioning is a faulty thermostat so you can click on over to my video about how to troubleshoot a faulty thermostat.

Anyway those are the five most common problems with heating and air conditioning that you will come across that will give you
a no cool or heat call, and I have videos on all of those so you can
check them out. I will try to put the links here or right on this videos so you can click over to watch those.

And thats the five most common problems with the indoor side of HVAC heating and air conditioning.

Posted by Kung Fu Maintenance

Maintenance Supervisor/Director for over ten years, artist, author, inventor, musician, home inspector, Certified Pool Operator, and EPA Certified as a Universal HVAC Technician.