Yesterday afternoon when I came inside from edging and mowing the front lawn, Andrea commented she felt pretty hot, and I didn’t think much of it because of course I’d been outside, so anything out of the sun felt cool to me.
Last night I noticed there wasn’t any air coming from the vents downstairs. The thermostat was set to 78 degrees fahrenheit, and the thermometer read 83. Uh-oh! The single package gas and electric unit, or “gas pack” as the HVAC people around here seem to call it, that cools and heats the downstairs was running, the top of the machine was cool, and showing some condensation, and air was being exhausted from the unit by the fan, but nothing out of the vents. The 3-month filter was replaced in May and didn’t look especially clogged or dirty.
I didn’t find a good troubleshooting guide online, as most of them are written for full-electric systems with separate blower and condensor units, like what we have upstairs, which is luckily still working fine. This isn’t the first problem we’ve had with this gas pack, but the other problems due to a brain-dead installation job. Our contractor had installed the unit in a little “L” of brick right next to our house and chimney, so the compressor and air intake were sitting about four inches from exposed brick, which of course gets nice and hot in the summer. The unit had to work extra-hard to overcome the radiant heat from the brick, and it fried the compressor.
A couple of years ago, we had a different contractor come out and pour a pad for the unit that was set several feet away from the house, so now the compressor and intake grill have plenty of open air around them.
My guess is the system just needs a good coolant charge, so in goes the service call, and I guess we’ll just spend more time roughing it upstairs if the first floor gets too hot!