The saga with our air conditioner has continued since my last post on the matter. One of the few disadvantages of growing up as an “Army brat” is that most of my formative years were spent living in apartment-style housing, where any D.I.Y. I may have learned to fix things that went wrong consisted of my parents calling in the problem. I also spent the first several years of my career after school also living in rental housing. When Andrea and I returned from London in 2001 and bought this house, it was really the first time I’d been responsible for the maintenance of anything more than a car, which of course I’d always paid someone else to do for me.
The contractor we called to bail us out last Sunday, Busby’s, who continues to do quality work for us and also to offer good advice, pointed out a number of problems, with both our downstairs unit, which was the one that wasn’t cooling, and with the upstairs unit, which wasn’t draining correctly due to a horribly lame drain pipe routing job by the previous contractor, Bryson’s.
Busby’s charged the downstairs gas pack, which was missing quite a bit of freon when they came on the Sunday we lost the AC. Since then, the downstairs unit has been working like a champ, but apparently the evaporator coil is what’s leaking, and will need to be replaced eventually if I don’t want to keep refilling it with freon.
The upstairs unit has never drained properly, so the drain pipe was backing up and dripping in to the secondary drain pan, the galvanized metal of which is pretty well corroded by now. With the notion that the drainage was the problem confirmed by the contractor, and with a helpful suggestion from Scott, who has a similar set-up and had a similar problem, to vent the primary drain pipe, I set out to fix the problem this weekend. Scott helped me with the first venting of the drain pipe, which involved sawing the pipe in half and using three organic solvents to clean, prime and cement the pipe ends together with a T joint. Unfortunately that didn’t fix the problem, but now I could see when the primary drain backed up.
I went around the outside of our house and several PVC drain outlets. I figured two of them belonged to the air handler for our upstairs air conditioner, so I hooked the wet vac up to each one in turn. I pulled nothing but air from two of them, which makes me wonder what they’re connected to, but that’s a mystery for another day. The final two I tested yielded a good 3 gallons of water, so I suspected one of them was the air handler. After running the AC again for an hour, I figured out which one it was. The system ran much better with the drain line clear, but even with the newly-installed vent, the drain backed up again after only an hour and a half.
Scott again pitched in a suggestion, this time to try venting the drain pipe downhill from the trap. I didn’t understand why that would be different from venting it above the trap, but those T joints are less than a dollar, and I was trying to avoid a thousand dollar repair bill to have a professional fix the drainage problem, so I tried it. While I was there, I also corrected a routing issue of the primary drain, where for some reason known only to the original installer, the primary drain pipe popped up and over the secondary drain, gaining at least an inch in elevation when it really should have been losing 1/4″ per foot, according to the installation manual I found online.
The difference is remarkable. Twenty minutes after the air kicks on, the drain pipe starts a steady drip. The secondary drain pain ends up what I’ll charitably call barely wet, rather than its’ previous habit of filling with water over an inch deep.
It’s only the day after the fix so I’m only running that unit when I’m home so I can keep an eye on it, but at this point I’m feeling pretty good that this latest home ownership hassle is well under control and, if not solved, at least we’re well on our way to a proper solution.