We just passed through the first serious heatwave of the year in Southern California, with temperatures in some areas hitting 100°F. This week will be cooler, but we’re all going to be on our toes now for more heat spikes—and putting our air conditioners to work regularly to make indoor life manageable.
If you have worries about your air conditioner malfunctioning and failing during the approaching heat, you are not alone. People are more concerned than ever about ensuring they have a comfortable household. Even the best care and the finest air conditioning system cannot ensure a problem-free summer. If you’re faced with a busted AC, we have some helpful tips. (An important reminder: before it gets any hotter, schedule air conditioning maintenance with our technicians—the best way to keep an AC in robust shape all summer.)
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.
The first serious week of warm weather for the middle of the year in Southern California is a good time to watch carefully the performance of your AC. If the air conditioner is starting off with poor performance that doesn’t keep your home cooled down the way it should, you want to have the proper 
Air conditioning systems get to work early in the year in Southern California. Unfortunately, that means they’re also likely to start showing signs of malfunctions earlier as well—extra time for the stress to set in.
In our last post, we wrote about why it’s important to schedule air conditioning maintenance service before the summer weather arrives. There are many potential AC malfunctions a maintenance inspection can catch, and one of these is noticing that the pressure of the refrigerant in the air conditioner has dropped. This usually means a leak a sprung somewhere, allowing refrigerant to escape. If this is the case, your technician can patch up the leak and put in the amount of refrigerant that was lost to restore pressure. You can trust our technicians with these services for your