Right now we’re in the middle of the worst heat of the summer in Southern California so far. This is when you most want your AC to work reliably and without needing emergency repair calls. But what makes August heat waves so difficult for air conditioning systems is that they’ve already been working regularly for a few months—plenty of time to build up dirt and stress that can lead to serious problems when the pressure is on from 90°+ heat!
If your AC has already gone through a rough summer, here are ways to tell that you may need to call us for preventive air conditioning repair in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA before the trouble becomes an AC that won’t cool at all.
Orange County only gets a small amount of relief from the heat in October. We can expect to have weather hovering in the 80s on many days this month. You’ll give your air conditioner a few small breaks, but you’ll think about the system less and less. Because of this “fall mindset,” you may not pay much attention to drops in cooling levels around your house.
You’re probably familiar with hard starting in vehicle engines. You turn on the ignition in an old car, and the motor grunts, grumbles, and struggles before it starts. This happens more often in colder climates than ours, but everyone knows what a hard-starting engine sounds like.
One of the first things we recommend people check when their air conditioning system suddenly stops working (fans, compressor, all of it) is to check the electrical panel. The circuit breaker to the air conditioning system may have tripped and cut off the electricity. Resetting the tripped breaker will restore the AC to normal working order.
Here’s the standard way central air conditioners all used to work: the air conditioned by the evaporator coil is pushed into the ventilation system by the blower fan in the air handler, sending the air to every vent in the house. On the surface, this sounds like exactly what a central AC is supposed to do.
Southern California summers are wonderful—and sometimes not so wonderful when the serious July, August, and September heat waves hit. Air conditioning systems run often during the middle of the year, and the drain they place on electricity means higher utility bills throughout the season.