AC Repair in Swarthmore, PA

In most of Swarthmore borough the air conditioning has nothing to do with the heating. It is a separate machine that arrived later, and it tends to live where nobody goes: an air handler in the attic, duct threaded through knee walls and the backs of closets, a condenser tucked into a shaded side yard. That is the main reason cooling faults here are well established by the time anyone rings about them.

We repair cooling equipment of any age and any brand, whoever fitted it. Calls go out from 630 Fairview Rd #110 in Swarthmore, and a person picks up the phone at any hour.

The attic is the difficult part

An unconditioned attic under a dark roof gets far hotter on a July afternoon than the outdoor air ever does, and equipment sitting up there is working in conditions its designer assumed it would never meet. Insulation on the suction line hardens and splits, so the line sweats and drips. Joints taped rather than sealed with mastic let go, and the system starts cooling the attic on the way to the bedrooms. A house that copes in the morning and gives up by three in the afternoon is usually describing that, not a failing compressor.

Shade is good for a condenser, debris is not

The mature canopy is one of the reasons people live in this borough, and on balance it helps an outdoor unit, since a condenser in shade sheds heat more easily than one baking in direct sun. What it does not help is the coil. Seed pods, samaras, leaf fall and the fine fluff off cottonwood build into the fins from the outside in, and the fins hide it well enough that the unit still looks clean. Once the coil cannot reject heat, head pressure rises, the compressor pulls more current, and something trips on the hottest day of the year.

Water in the wrong place

Cooling equipment in an attic produces several gallons of water on a humid day and has to move all of it out of the house. When the primary drain slimes up, a working float switch stops the system, which is the safety doing exactly what it was fitted for. Homeowners read that as an electrical fault and reset the breaker. If your cooling keeps stopping and restarting on sticky days with nothing else obviously wrong, look at the drain before the wiring.

What gets measured before anything gets quoted

• ✓Static pressure across the air handler and filter, which separates an air problem from a refrigerant problem
• ✓Return and supply temperatures, and the difference between them
• ✓System pressures read against superheat or subcooling, whichever the fitted metering device calls for
• ✓Current draw on the compressor and condenser fan, compared with the data plate
• ✓Capacitor value tested against its rating, not judged by whether it looks swollen
• ✓Condensate path, secondary pan and float switch on anything above a finished ceiling

Older refrigerant, honest arithmetic

Some of the earliest retrofits in these houses are still running, and a number are charged with R-22, which has not been produced for years. On that equipment a leak stops being a routine repair and becomes a question about whether the system is worth keeping. The label on the outdoor unit answers which one you have, and we would rather have that conversation before you pay for a charge that will be gone again by August.