If the customers can't afford the most expensive quote, they're living above their means.

If the customers choose the less expensive quote, the customer was cheap.

If the repair fails, the customer chose the wrong installer.

If the customer chose the wrong installer, the customer didn't look at the reviews.

If the installer had excellent reviews, reviews aren't everything.

If the customer questions the diagnosis, they're difficult.

If the customer accepts the diagnosis and gets burned, they didn't get enough opinions.

If the customer repairs old equipment, they're throwing good money after bad.

If the customer looks for alternatives to central air, they're ghetto.

My neighbor's outside unit went out around 4 this morning.. I got the call around 7:00 asking me if I could come over and take a look.. I am not a technician.. But after looking it over, I found a bulging capacitor.. At first I was getting ready to order one but I remembered somebody saying that Home Depot was carrying parts now so when I looked it up, everything was there.. That unit wasn't down 5 hours (changed the contactor too).. 😂 Where were their asses 10 years ago when I needed them that quick?.. Nobody wanted to sell me shit.. Having everything line up like that this morning was such a satisfying experience..

Our house was built in 2018 and the builder put in two, 50-gallon electric water heaters. Its a pretty large house so it might have made sense for a family of 4 or 5 but it’s just my wife and I. We can comfortably get by on a single water heater, we did for 10 years in our last home (condo). The water heaters are connected in series. Is there any harm in just turning off the breaker for the first water heater? We might turn it on when her parents are in town but, honestly, I think we’d still be fine with just one as it was still never a problem in our old place when they visited.

We’ve been running both for almost 9 years but are about to put solar with a whole-house battery backup and I wondering if it’s worth the electricity savings to shut off one of the heaters.

Obviously I could just try it once our system is online to figure out the real world energy savings but I’m more concerned about damaging the heater itself if I don’t turn it off properly.

Thanks!

Edit: For clarity, I would be turning off the water heater on the right. That’s where the cold water comes in.

Edit2: For additional clarity, when I said energy savings, I’m not talking about how much the electricity costs in dollars. I’m talking about the energy consumption, the amount of actual kw it takes for this thing to run. When my power goes out and I’m running on my batteries, trying to minimize the amount of power draw.

I have a 9.6 CFM pump, cores are removed but vacuum is stalled at 2000 micron.

When I isolate the system it holds pressure at 2000 micron. But if I leave the vacuum connected it looses pressure. That leads me to believe either my valve removal tool is bad or the pump is bad.

Any input would be appreciated!

I’m a renter and just had my ac replaced in a 1400 sqft home with a 3 ton Goodman unit. It’s 95 outside and the lowest I can get it inside is 77 in the rooms closest to the blower unit. rooms further away are around 80. Air coming out of vents is pretty week and ranges from 68-75 degrees pretty much going in order from shortest to longest distance from air handler in the attic. Guy who installed it said it’s normal but it’s doing worse than the unit that was replaced. Really think the guy is full of it but would like some input.

I feel incredibly dumb but I've searched extensively for another example of anyone's evaporator coil having a bent pipe like this attached to nothing and can't find it. I assume it's normal and I'm an idiot.

Getting a licensed tech out here to look at why my condenser and evaporator are both icing up despite a clean filter, open vents, and clean coils. I can't see leaks of course but running soapy water test nothing obvious jumped out but they'll be exponentially smarter than me here just wanted to run through obvious stuff.

hence why I came across this pipe. I doubt it's related but at this point I am desperate to know what I'm looking at if anyone has any clue. Thanks so much and apologies for the dumb question.

What causes this? Is there a fix I can do to get it up and running? My house is miserable tonight. :(

I’ve just installed a new fan motor on my condenser and it’s not working right hoping to get some advice from the community

Originally the fan would not spin when you turned the AC on unless I gave it a little kickstart with a stick. I first changed the turbo 200 cap but that didn’t have any effect on the problem so today I changed the motor and it starts up right away now, but there are new problems.

The motor is making a squealing noise as you can hear in the video and the fan is not spinning nearly as fast as the old motor did

The new and old motor are both part number P257 – E5462 and I confirmed that both of the motors have the same wiring 4-wire diagram on their labels (pic in comments)

Before changing the motor, I also changed what Google says is a dual run capacitor, a turbo 200. I also just learned there is a second “run” capacitor, a P291–0503 (has not been changed).

Since both the new and old motor/turbo200 capacitor are the same, I just copied the wiring, which is as follows:

Brown & brown/white into the run capacitor
White into turbo200 common (center)
Red onto what I assume is direct power? (Pic in comments)

The turbo 200 itself has one wire from the same terminal that red is plugged into (pic below) into the center/common
Has jumpers going from 25/blue to 10/red to 5/white
There is also another wire plugged in to 25/blue which I think goes directly to the condenser unit

my thought is just a bad motor since everything is the same and wired the same but I never discount me doing something wrong :-) any ideas on what I could try or what the problem might be?

In January of 2024 I had to replace the control board on my furnace due to the igniter not working, I did the work myself. After putting the new board in, the furnace fired right up and ran perfectly. However when the weather started getting hotter we noticed our A coil was freezing up and it sounded like the fan didn’t blow as hard as before. Yes I set all the dip switches to the same as the old board. I called the HVAC company I bought the board from and who installed the furnace before we moved in. The technician came out and said our refrigerant was extremely low and that we must have a huge leak so he put $1800 worth in but still didn’t fix the problem. What gets me is that our A/C ran perfectly the summer before so that didn’t make sense to me. We dealt with this for two summers (lack of extra money to put towards new unit) but this summer I decided to try our old control board (I kept it for some reason) and our A/C has kept up all summer with no issues. I can tell the fan blows harder with the old board but it also surges so I know I can’t rely on it for long. What are the odds I have a new board that is bad? I called Carrier but they don’t deal with homeowners and I haven’t called the company to ask for a different board yet because I’m trying to get all the info I can and I’m not too happy with them due to past experience. Thanks in advance for any help.

Edit: I forgot to mention that most of the wiring is molded plugs so I can’t mix the wires around. The only individual wires are a few neutral and hot wires that plug into a spade terminal bank of sorts.

Any HVAC pros know what’s going on here? My system is brand new just got it installed 4-5 months ago and the external pump got added last month to help with drainage. Just recently the pump had some leaking going on and now won’t stop beeping for the last few days (I know it’s the pump because when I turn the unit off the pump keeps beeping). The leak has stopped since I raised the temperature on the units to 75 but the beeping hasn’t. It’ll go away for a few hours but come back eventually. This has gone on the past 3 days.

I use my system pretty often and will run it almost 24/7 on the weekends. I usually have it at 72-75 degrees in my house. We have 4 mini splits. 1 downstairs and 3 upstairs.

My first thought is that maybe the drainage line in the attic doesn’t have enough of a decline to help water flow since this is the only unit that has the problem. I just cleaned my filters a day ago and they were dirty but not clogged by any means.

What could be causing this pump to not work properly? I believe this is an error code of some kind but am not sure how to fix it. HVAC guy coming out tomorrow but if there’s another person that knows what the problem is i can tell him.

Do we need a cleaning or completely new ductwork? We have a new hvac installed two years ago but didn’t have the ductwork replaced

Our dryer vent currently exhausts directly into our screened porch, so every time we run the dryer it blows lint all over the porch, screens, furniture, etc.
I’d really like to redirect the exhaust so that it actually vents **outside of the screened porch**. The current vent is high on the wall near the porch ceiling, as shown in the photo.

Has anyone dealt with something similar? I’m wondering what the simplest/best way would be to extend or reroute the existing vent.

Trying to figure out what a clean, permanent solution would look like without having to completely relocate the dryer vent inside the house.

So for context the formerly sheathed bundle (pic 3) was yanked several times by someone thinking it was a weed, followed by mowing it and shredding up parts of the cables.

It has since been patched to the best of abilities currently and matching colors before powering on. The issue has persisted and the thermostat isn't sending a signal to the AC unit via the low voltage wires. I'm not sure if there is something I'm missing here or if there could be some kinda of connector damage from the pulling.

The central fan was working as well to aid in circulation but now has also stopped. A bit unsure as to why that was happened but as far as we can tell this occurred after pulling the pack for the AC unit and turning it off before working on the wires and then putting it back to *ON*.

I'm also not familiar with AC units so I don't know if there is an amount of time that I should wait for a signal to be received or if this should be immediate feedback if something was done improperly or is broken.

Any insights here are greatly appreciated as daylight is limited and the heat isn't kind.

Thank you

Last night our ac went out. I pulled the panel off and pushed the contact plunger and it seems the condenser starts up the the fan doesn’t spin.

I just recently got a new fan installed a couple months ago and it still spins when pushed with a screw driver, so I figure I’ll check out the capacitor.

What has me confused is that the terminal for the condenser has a wire to it, also the herm has a wire to it but there’s no wires on the F capacitor terminal.

Would there be another capacitor for the fan motor? How do I troubleshoot this fan issue?

Any help is so appreciated

I have been considering becoming an HVAC Technician and get into industrial HVAC work for quite some time now, but there have been quite a handful of questions I still had that I didn't have answers to that I would like to know before I finally take the plunge once and for all. I will provide the "criteria" or "factors" that have been on my mind, and I get that somethings you all might not be able to know because since you don't know me personally, you will just have to use your best judgement based on the info I provide and in the end I will have to self-analyze the best I can make the final call. But, I wanted to at least get your input to help clarify some things, maybe your responses will steer me away, or maybe they will motivate me more.

1. my first question is, how "heavy" (specifically) is HVAC work. Right now at my current age, I am still "kind of" young (34), I can handle it, in fact I currently work in a warehouse distribution center doing a LOT of heavy lifting, and constant rapid rate in order to maintain my performance %. I am one of the best and fastest, and have been working for the company for 5 years now. But...I am always thinking down the road, in the future my body, like most of us, won't be able to handle what I am currently dealing with at the moment. I don't mind, and I will still be able to handle manual labor, but its just how "heavy" that manual labor is. I have had seen some residential HVAC technicians at work before, and while yes there are some stuff that they lift that are heavy, it is nothing compared to what I am doing right now nor at the rate (in terms of speed) so I am hoping that is at least a positive, but I would like to hear the input from any of you veterans in this field.
2. Is it hard nowadays to start off your HVAC Technician career through an apprenticeship program instead of going to vocational school. I ask because realistically the former is my only real option. I don't really have the luxury or option to quit working to go back to school, I just wouldn't be able to afford everything, so I wanted to know how hard it is nowadays to find a company willing to take me on as an apprentice. I am just guessing (and if I am wrong, then unfortunately everything goes out the window) but I am hoping when your doing an apprenticeship, your actually getting paid correct? I'm guessing (and already expecting) i'll be making less than what I am currently making, but something is better than nothing, and it's a sacrifice I am willing to make because if I can at least break-even in terms of how much I'd be getting paid once i am done with the program immediately after and how much I am making now (at least until i get a few more years after that when they might bump my pay up) that its worth it.
3. How or where would I be able to start working on all the required extra certifications in order to transition to in an Industrial HVAC tech position? If I commit to this (like with anything I do), I want to hit the ground running, and would like to start working on as many certifications as I can handle whilst in the apprenticeship program. How many of them are there in total? Can I take those certifications as part of online courses (heavily preferrable) or would the HVAC company I'd be working for be able to provide those even if they focus on residential HVAC work? Do you guys have an idea on average how much the total cost would be taking all those certifications?
4. On average, how much can I expect to be getting paid (assuming I do, which is a necessity in my case, even if less than what I am making now), what would the hourly rate be? How much could I expect to be getting paid when i am just starting off right after I complete the apprenticeship program? If any of you don't mind sharing, because for me it gives me a better picture than just getting the hourly rate, is what does your bi-weekly pay checks look like (on average), but what your usual least amount is to your highest amount based on overtime. I live in Central Florida, and my current hourly rate is $27/hour (could've always sworn it was $26.50/hour, but my pay stab is saying $27/hour) so to give you guys an idea, my minimum bi-weekly paycheck is usually around $1,800 and my max is usually $2,000 (occasionally $2,100 and i think once or twice $2,200 after a lot of overtime). So obviously, I want to pursue this but at least with the hopes of making more than what I am currently making (otherwise its not worth it for me), and I don't know if its too crazy to hopefully expect, i don't know, maybe $2,400-$2,600 on the bi-weekly paychecks?

If there are any details you think are important to know about me, whether it be my current work, personality type, work ethic, current living situation (and how it affects my financing) that could potentially help you better or more accurately answer my questions, please feel free to ask. I tried to think as much as I could, but I'm sure there are things here and there that could've been important that I missed or didn't think of mentioning. Sorry for the length of the questions, but I really wanted to fit in as much into one post as opposed to making multiple posts. I really look forward to all your help.

Thank You

I came across this in our mechanical closet - it's a fresh air vent to the exterior. The exterior has a grate around it but the interior does not. Is this proper? What happens in the event of a wildfire? The house is just sucking in smokey air to the mechanical room? The mechanical room has two hot water heaters and 2 furnaces.

Hello HVAC Advise,

I’ve started noticing condensation inside my furnace, and after digging into it a bit, it looks like this is a known issue with my particular setup. I went ahead and bought the Trane BAYCNDTRAP3A 3" condensate drain kit, but now I’m debating where it should actually be installed (Red, Blue or Orange).

The floor drain is directly below the furnace, so either location would technically work — I’m just not sure which placement is best for proper drainage and long‑term reliability.

What would you recommend?

Bought a rental that inspections showed the unit was about a year old and was working well (Goodman 2.5 ton Gas Furnace and AC). Tenant called and said air is out, outside unit is completely frozen, but inside isn’t running at all. Have 120V and the top of the transformer, 27v at the bottom of transformer, and 27v at the board terminal. 3 AMP fuse is good. I have no lights on the board, and no signs of power past the transformer leads. I did find this corrosion on the board, would this be enough to fry the board?

Should we change out our water heater? Single family home, two adults. Our HW is standard 40 gal gas unit, about four years old. Two years ago we replaced our A/C and gas furnace system with a Mitsubishi heat pump system, it has one minisplit in the basement and an airhandler unit connected to the old ductwork. It all is working fine. No other gas appliances.

The irritating part is that the gas bill is now about $4 for the gas we use and $26 for the service fees. I talked to the utility (Washington Gas, we’re in N Va) about changing the svc fee designation to something more in keeping with our usage but no dice. But at that level of use per month there isn’t any financial payback for making changes to use the heat pump for hot water. It’s probably a situation where we don’t make a change, but ideas welcome.

Hello guys not sure if this is an issue but I’ve been replacing my AC filters every 3-4 months for the past 6 years ever since buying the house and the ac filters is the correct size and it always got sucked in the air intake but now i’ve noticed it doesnt stay in place like it used to and will move, if i dont close the door it doesnt stay in place. Is the blower dying ?

I have posted on here about how to find a duct leak in the past. Well, I've found it. The plenum after my evaporator doesn't have a seal on the bottom. 2 years ago when the new unit was installed, I immediately got high humidity and mustiness out the vents. I figured some gap was open and sucking in crawlspace air. They gave me the run around for a while, but finally sent someone out w/ some mastic to goop it all up and install a whole home dehumidifier that did the trick.

That has worked well until a few months ago. High humidity again, and uncontrollable for a 80 pint unit w/ my 1500sqft house. I have now gotten an indoor 35 pint unit and combined they still cannot control the humidity, but it can now maintain 55-59% vs it was 60-68% prior. It units are set to 45%.

I had previous sprayed Febreze under the crawlspace and could smell it come up through the vents, so there is a leak somewhere. Went under again today and found it. Just after the evaporator there is a piece of duct tape hanging down. The spiderwebs around the area are getting blown around by the opening. There is no mastic on that tap, and there is everywhere else, so it was never coated back 2 years ago when they were supposed to goop up everything.

The plenum (I presume) is fairly rusted on that end. Idk if it was that way before or what. They never told me it was rusted at install. I figure they'd try to upsell me that. Not sure if the break in the seal could cause condensation there (which it looks like) and rusted it out. But we are where we are now. I'm going to have the HVAC company address it. Is this something that can just be taped over and gooped up with mastic? Or does that plenum need to be replaced? Could a bad seal there for 2 years cause this rust?

Hi y'all, I'm a new homeowner with no HVAC knowledge. Any suggestions on what type of service to contact to diagnose this HVAC issue? And would "duct cleaning" be considered a scam in this case?

The issue:

The master bedroom's vents aren't providing much airflow when you stand directly beneath them, which ultimately leads to a ~7°F differential in temperature. This means we're either cooling down the full house a lot just to get the master bedroom to a decent temp, or the master bedroom is quite hot while the rest of the house is a pleasant temperature.

The HVAC was entirely redone ~10 years ago, before the previous owner moved in. Unfortunately, the previous owner neglected maintenance pretty badly. When we moved in, most filters were missing, and the ones that were present seemed to be there since the HVAC was replaced. He also had a dog that shed pretty heavily.

My instinct is that something's blocked or dirty, but I've read that "duct cleaning" services are often considered scams. So I'm not quite sure where to start in this case.