Questions we get asked in driveways

The fee is real and published. What it covers has never been written down in one place, so here it is.

Saturday and Sunday are by appointment rather than standard hours.

A diagnosis costs $75, and that is on purpose. A free estimate is a sales call, and its cost is already sitting inside the quote you get at the end of it. Pricing a whole replacement is a different visit and a different conversation, so ask about that one on the phone.

More on how pricing works

Credit cards are accepted. There is no financing program and no maintenance plan today. Every other site in this category has both, and inventing them here would be the easiest lie on this page to tell.

Four usual suspects: a capacitor, a contactor, a clogged condensate drain that tripped the float switch, or a low charge with a leak sitting behind it. Those are four very different afternoons and four very different invoices, which is exactly why the first thing anybody should do is find out which one you have.

Before you call, look at the filter and at the breaker. Both are free to check and both occasionally end the whole story.

That is usually a failed run capacitor, and it is one of the cheaper faults on the list. Shut the system off at the thermostat and leave it off. Do not start the fan with a stick: it is a live 240 volt machine and it will hurt you.

The condensate drain is almost certainly clogged. The pan filled, and the float switch either did its job and shut the system down or did not and the water went looking for somewhere else to be. Turn the system off and call.

Do not pour anything down the drain line hoping to clear it. Half the ceiling repairs in this trade start there.

Turn it off and let it thaw. Ice means either airflow (a filter, a collapsed flex duct, a dirty coil) or charge (a leak). Running a frozen system is how a compressor dies, and the compressor is the expensive part.

No. A breaker that trips repeatedly is doing its job, and every reset feeds a fault that is already drawing current it should not. Leave it off and call.

Because equipment here is sized for a design day in the mid nineties, and August regularly is not that. On a 104 degree afternoon a correctly sized system runs continuously, and that is the design working rather than failing.

The number that matters is the difference between the air going into the return and the air coming out of a supply vent. Roughly twenty degrees is healthy. Running constantly and still losing ground is the actual symptom worth calling about.

Ten to fifteen years is the usual window, and Central Texas sits at the low end of it because a system here runs eight months a year with an attic full of 140 degree air on top of it. A twelve year old unit is not automatically finished. It is just old enough that a big repair deserves a second thought.

Four things decide it: how old it is, what this repair costs, what refrigerant it runs, and how many repairs it has had in the last two years. A common rule of thumb is to multiply the age by the repair quote and see whether the result has gotten uncomfortable.

Some days that conversation costs the shop the bigger sale. It is still the right conversation. How a replacement is decided.

Not in the case of R-22. It has not been produced or imported in the United States since 2020, so what is left is reclaimed stock and it gets more expensive every year. If a system on R-22 has a leak, that changes the math honestly.

R-410A is a different story: it is still available, and a leak on its own is not a reason to replace anything. The refrigerant is printed on the nameplate of the outdoor unit, and it moves this decision more than almost anything else.

That comes from a load calculation, a Manual J, which accounts for your windows, insulation, duct layout and which way the house faces. Square footage divided by a magic number is a guess, and the guess is usually too big.

Oversized is not safer. An oversized system short cycles, never runs long enough to pull moisture out of the air, and leaves you with a house that is cold and clammy at the same time.

Inside city limits, yes, and the cities in this service area are clear about it. Leander requires a permit for construction inside the city, mechanical work included. Cedar Park lists heating and air conditioning equipment by name on its own list of work that needs one. Round Rock pulls a mechanical permit with a final inspection. Georgetown requires one to install, alter or repair a system, through a registered contractor.

Out in unincorporated Williamson County there is no county residential mechanical permit, and Leander's extraterritorial jurisdiction only requires permits for signs and for water and wastewater connections. Which side of a city line your house sits on is a real question and worth asking before the work starts.

Yes, and that is most of the work. Nearly everything in a Leander or Cedar Park subdivision was put in by the builder years before anyone here saw it.

Monday to Friday, 7:00am to 5:00pm. Saturday and Sunday by appointment. There is no overnight line, and there is no night crew to answer it. Two people would rather tell you that than promise midnight and not show up.

Some days yes and some days no, and it depends entirely on what the day already looks like. Call and you will get a straight read on it rather than a maybe that turns into tomorrow at six in the evening.

Leander, Cedar Park, Georgetown, Round Rock and Liberty Hill. If you are outside that, call anyway. Sometimes the answer is yes and sometimes the honest answer is that somebody closer will get there faster.

Somebody over eighteen does, because the diagnosis ends in a decision about money and that decision is not ours to make on your behalf. Access to the attic and to the electrical panel is the other half of it.

Clear whatever is stacked under the attic hatch. Put the dog somewhere. Know where the outdoor unit is and whether anything is growing into it. If you can read the model and serial off the nameplate over the phone, that alone can put the right part on the truck before it leaves.