In Dallas where it’s a 100 degrees and of course the a/c stops working on a Sunday! I call the a/c people who came out 2 months ago to fix it and after 8 hours still haven’t heard back from them, even though they have 24/7 plastered all over their website. So I decide to see what I can do on my own. 

Back to 2 months ago, a/c stopped working, I call out the a/c guy, and he replaces the capacitor. A/C unit is from August 2016 so it was just barely under the 10 year warranty. It’s been working fine since….until today. 

So my first thought is that maybe the capacitor went bad again. I try to test it myself, but only have a basic multimeter without a capacitance mode, so I do the ohms check. Numbers were jumped but not like what I’ve seen online. I see the capacitor is only $23 and the Home Depot not far from me had a couple, so for me, $23 is worth a shot. Worst case I’d have a spare capacitor. 

By the way, up to this point, the fan blades would spin freely when the unit was off, and when it would kick on, it made the typical humming sound and you could move the blades, but there was some resistance and they’d only spin one turn or so. 

So I get the new capacitor, replace it, flip all the power back on, and the fans start spinning! I go inside the house, grab my temp gun, and cool air is coming out of the vents!

Victory! I have that awesome feeling when you fix something you’ve never worked on before.

Then after about 15 minutes, I notice the air isn’t feeling cool anymore coming out of the vents. I go back outside, and the fan is doing what it was before, humming, but not spinning. 

There goes that victorious feeling. I find some things online about safety switches and things overheating. So just to try the most simple thing out, I pull up the grate with the fan (power off again obviously), grab a hose and start hosing it all down and through the coils. I could almost hear the a/c sigh in relief after not having any rain for like 6 weeks and nonstop triple digit heat here for basically the entire month of August. 

I button it all back up, flip the power on, and it starts spinning again…for about 4 seconds and then back to humming and not moving. 

So I’m thinking the old capacitor was fine, it was just the fact that it had a break for about 2 hours with no power is what seemed to fix it. And why the second time, it only spun for a few seconds as it only had about a 15 minute break. 

So now here we are and I’m looking for advice on what to look into next. Otherwise I think I’m just going to call another a/c place. I mainly called the one that was out 2 months ago because I figured the repair would have been warrantied. But now that it’s not the capacitor that they replaced, and the fact that I can’t reach anyone in an emergency when their website says they’re always available for emergencies, makes me want to not even bother with them anymore. 

I’ll see if I can add a pic of the a/c model in case that helps, and thanks!

Need help with a/c fan spinning/not spinning