AC repair
A Memphis July finds every weakness a cooling system has, and it finds them all in the same week. When one quits, the useful question is not whether someone can come. It is what they will measure when they do, because ten minutes with gauges separates an inexpensive afternoon from a four-figure one.
What a real service call covers
The electrical suspects first, because heat kills them first: the run capacitor measured against its rating, the contactor checked for pitting, the compressor’s draw read under load. Then the loop itself: refrigerant charge measured rather than assumed, with a temperature split across the coil to confirm what the gauges claim. Then the two things this city adds: the outdoor coil, inspected for the pollen and cottonwood that mat it every spring, and the condensate drain, which in Memphis humidity shuts down more systems than compressors do.
Where your equipment lives changes the visit. On a slab house the air handler is in the attic, so the drain pan, its float switch and the secondary pan all belong on the checklist. That is the difference between a no-cool afternoon and a ceiling repair. On a crawl-space house the ductwork underneath is worth a look at the same time, because damp air down there does slow damage to insulation and metal that nobody sees from inside.
Repair or replace, without the pressure
Ordinary wear is ordinary: capacitors, contactors, fan motors and drain switches are consumables on a machine that runs a long Memphis season. A compressor or coil failure is a different category: a large repair on a system whose every other component carries the same hours, facing another hundred-day summer the moment it is fixed. And on older equipment, the refrigerant itself can change the arithmetic before anyone touches the leak.
What protects you either way is a written finding: what failed, what was measured, what each path costs. A visit that ends with a number and no findings is a quote, not a diagnosis, and in a heat wave, when every shop’s phone is ringing, that written finding is also the only thing that makes a second opinion possible.
Quick answers
- Why did the AC quit during the hottest week?
- Because heat is load, and load finds the weak part. A tired capacitor, a matted coil or a charge drifting low all survive May and fail together in the first real heat wave. It is the most predictable failure date on the Memphis calendar.
- There is water on my ceiling and the AC stopped, related?
- Almost certainly. On slab-built houses the air handler sits in the attic and drains condensate through a small line; when it clogs, the pan backs up. A float switch stops the system before the ceiling pays for it, worth confirming you have one.
- My AC won’t shut off and the house still feels muggy, what’s going on?
- That combination usually points at ice on the coil or a charge that has drifted low, not a unit that is simply undersized for the house. An iced coil chokes its own airflow, so the blower runs constantly while barely moving cool air past it; pull the filter and you can often see how starved it is. A low charge does the same thing for a different reason: each cycle pulls less heat out of the house, so the system just keeps cycling to catch up. Either way, it is worth shutting the system off long enough to let any ice melt before a tech puts gauges on it.
- At what point does it make more sense to replace the AC instead of fixing it?
- A rule of thumb a lot of Memphis techs use: take the age of the unit, multiply it by the dollar figure on the repair quote, and see where that lands against roughly five thousand. Below that line, fixing it is usually still the better bet; well past it, the repair money starts pulling its weight better toward a new system instead. A six-year-old unit needing an eight-hundred-dollar fan motor stays comfortably on the repair side; a sixteen-year-old system quoted at two thousand does not. Equipment still under manufacturer warranty is the exception that pulls the decision back toward repair regardless of the math.
- 1 Thermostat. The season’s odometer: a hundred cooling days pass through it.
- 2 Return and filter. The lungs, and the first thing a retrofit house sized too small.
- 3 Air handler and furnace. Up in the attic, asleep nine months, asked for everything in December.
- 4 Coil and condensate drain. Liters of river-valley moisture a day, leaving through one narrow line above your ceiling.
- 5 Attic ducts. The coldest air in the house, commuting through the hottest room on the property.
- 6 Outdoor unit. Full sun, full load. August culls capacitors here by the thousand.