This morning, after a hot humid night, I pulled the inside coil apart and saw a solid block of hair, lint, and nasty blocking the coil. It looked like one of those dryer filters where you pull it out and think “Huh, I could make a sweater out of that”. I started pulling it apart by hand, but it was taking too long and the dust was just too nasty to keep breathing in. I ran to Home Depot and picked up some wire brushes and dust masks among other things.
Now a normal person, in the Texas summer heat, would have called a HVAC company to come out and fix the problem. Now, I’m clearly not a normal person. First, I wanted to figure it out myself. So I searched, read, poked, disassembled, speculated, and tested. Second, I’m cheap. It is a weekend and I didn’t want to pay extra fees to get prompt service. Plus, depending on the problem I could fix it myself. Otherwise, we could wait it out. At least I would have something to do (poking, testing, etc) while the weekend melted into a weekday.
So four to five hours of hand cleaning and I got the thing cleaned up. I pulled out two ounces of dust/lint. Normally the tech would have pumped out the freon, pulled the coil, cleaned it in acid (as I understand) and reinstalled. All in all this is probably better, but costs several hundred dollars. And as I’ve mentioned I’m cheap (frugal if you prefer, but cheap is easier to say).
So now we are set at 78F (cheap again, it costs about 6% more for every degree you go down below 78%). Plus compared to the sticky 93F it was today it feels pretty good. I think it hit about 88F in the house. We actually had the windows open for a time this morning. Now we have been running the A/C for about seven hours without any icing up either inside or out. I did clean the outside coil as well, though it was in far better shape.
The picture on the top is the before. Solidly blocked. The picture on the bottom is just before I had finished. Same part of the coil, only now you can clearly see that it is actually made of metal.
