AC's Fixed

Thursday night the AC quit working. Faced with at least four days of 90+ degree heat, we had to get it fixed.

Nobody wanted to do it. Nobody could get here till next week.

???

I don't get it. My AC doesn't work. I'm willing to pay you to fix it and you won't? In "this economy" I'd think companies and their personnel would be happy to make more money - money at a premium because I need it done now and am willing to pay for it.

Finally we found someone.

It was a quick fix. He was gone in fifteen minutes.

The condensation pump backed up, thus shut down the AC. Huh?

So this is the pump. The white PVC pipes are inputs from the AC coil. As the AC runs, it condensates and the water runs into this pump, which pumps it to our septic system through the clearish vinyl tube between the PVC pumps. The wire circled in red, is the overflow switch. If the pump overflows, it shuts down the HVAC. The AC won't run. You can't really see it in this picture, but the floor is wet from overflow.

So why did it overflow?

Two reasons.

The root cause was this.

This is where the pump pumps the water to. It's the drain pipe off our kitchen sink. The vinyl tube is basically glued into the top of the drain pipe. This is a great example of bad plumbing. If the kitchen drain backs up (as it has the potential to do), so will the condensation pump. The plumber guy that showed up disconnected the tube from the pump, blew in it, temporarily cleared the blockage and left with the AC running. By the time I got home, it was clogged again and not running.

The second reason all this failed was our whole house dehumidifier. It pumps water out constantly (it's a dehumidifier. that's what it's supposed to do). If you look at the first photo again, you'll see a hole in the bottom right hand corner of the pump. That was the inlet for the drain tube from the dehumidifier. The pump at the HVAC unit was handling the water from the AC and the dehumidifier. When the drain clogged, the dehumidifier just kept pumping water into it.

Luckily the dehumidifier was also part of the solution. It's located in another room, so it requires quite a bit of tubing to drain into the pump at the HVAC unit. When Mattioni was here in April to install our new water conditioner, they installed a proper water drain for these types of things (the water conditioner requires it for backwash purposes).

I knew my condensation pump drain was a bad implementation and should have switched to this new setup as soon as Mattioni left, but it wasn't a priority. Since this new drain is farther away from the HVAC pump, I had to shut down the dehumidifier (which you should do while running the AC anyway), and use it's longer drain hose to get the HVAC pump drain to reach the new setup.

Took about twenty minutes. The AC came on as soon as the pump was able to evacuate the little bit of water it needed to register as not overflowing.

Now I have to go back and rerun all my drain hoses to the new setup, so I can run the dehumidifier when we turn off the AC after this heat spell.

I also have to figure out what to do with the old drain.

Currently I have the old drain hose pinched off to keep the septic gasses at bay, though I need a more permanent solution.

At least the AC is running and the house is cool.

- b