Check the easy things first.

I hammer on and on about looking for the simplest potential cause for a problem before tearing deep into things. It's not just applicable to motorcycles; it's also true for prety much everythng else in life that can go wrong.

This week's example brought to by the summer heat.

My daughter's whole-house air conditioner failed earlier this week. Thankfully the home warranty is still in force, so no big deal. Well it would be no big deal if the warranty company had bothered to follow up on placing a service call. As it turns out that was a fortunate error.

The deductible on the home warranty is $75, so no matter what happens that is what my daughter would have to pay. Even if the entire system had to be replaced with a new one, her cost would be $75. Pretty good deal. Except for the part about nobody coming out to look at the problem.

Today she got fed-up with waiting, and the lack of response from the warranty company, so she did what any person should do. She looked on the intertubes for possible solutions, then she called me to double-check that the intertubes were right. In the end the trouble was the fuses for the compressor motor had failed (likely due to age and heat exposure, the unit is quite old). $2.50 later and the A/C is cooling her home just fine.

Check the easy things first.

 

My dad is an HVAC guy and he would likely have more to say on that particular issue but I agree very much. I would have done the same thing. $2.50 is far better than the $75 she would have likely gotten charged by the warranty company for the service call. Glad it worked out

 

Certainly there could be other reasons why the fuses stopped conducting current, but no evidence of such a cause was found. The unit was serviced just 10 months ago, and ceramic fuses are far from perfect devices even as simple as they are

 

+1 I was spoiled when I moved into the house we renovated/are renovating. He installed a brand new high efficiency furnace and duct work, central air conditioning, as well as a zone system since there are living quarters in the lower level. The funny part is the condenser unit that sits outside. I assumed it was new and had asked when he planned to hook it up since it was quite warm when we moves in last year. His reply to me was whenever he got around to finding and hopefully fixing the leak in it! Well he and I must have gotten lucky, or he's good at his work, because it works wonderfully. Although I do admit it has been used but once or twice for a few hours this year.