Maintenance is key to making your AC home comfort system last longer. If you are detecting an odor or smell from your AC unit, then please give a HVAC professional a call for routine maintenance. If the breaker trips immediately when the AC unit is plugged in, then call Air Source America to check out what is going on with the air conditioning system. If the breaker only trips periodically, please call an electrician. That breaker could be wearing out. If your air conditioning or heating system is running all the time, round the clock, then it could be that it is not running at its peak efficiency. This could mean that you are paying a lot more for your electricity due to an inefficient AC unit. If you like, give us a call. Air Source America will send a technician to check it out for you. It can range depending on if the ductwork is exposed to the elements or if rodents have gotten in there. The answer is in the best case scenario, if the ductwork has been properly installed, then it should last around 20 years.

Surprisingly, the answer is no. In the South and Florida, the ducts are not made well enough to clean. In fact, it may be better to replace your ducts if they happen to be bad enough to need cleaning. Maintenance is key to making anything last longer. fan coil unit animationIt prevents little problems from becoming big problems. wesper air handling unitWe have found that routine maintenance will make your Air Conditioning system to work better, more efficiently, as well as last longer.how does hvac silencer work First check your breakers. This will probably be the easiest think to check and fix. Many things can cause your electrical system to trip. If the breaker is not tripped, go ahead and turn off the air conditioning unit. This will prevent further damage to the outside unit.

After that, give us a call. Turn off the AC unit, then go outside and clear the drain line. You can do this with a a shop vac suctioning the PVC drain line where the drain terminates outside. Once it clears, you can turn the air conditioner back on. If that hasn’t fixed the leaky AC, give us a call. The first thing you can do check if your breaker is tripped. The next thing is to clear the drain line out with a shop vac. If it is neither of these, give us a call. The culprit is probably a dirty filter. Turn off the AC unit, replace the filter and see if the unit still freezes up.An arc-fault circuit interrupter (AFCI) is a circuit breaker* located in your electrical panel that serves the functions of a normal breaker but also senses hazardous arcing on its circuit and will trip off for this. It can be identified by the special colored test-button near its handle. (Ground-fault breakers also have a button, so read with a magnifying glass to be sure which kind your breaker is.)

*A different device is now allowed away from your breaker panel. It resembles the familiar GFCI receptacles. (Its installation is more strict, however.) It is called an "outlet/ branch-circuit type of AFCI" or simply AFCI outlet or AFCI receptacle. AFCI breakers began to be required by Code in 2002 for new wiring supplying bedrooms. The areas to be protected were expanded in 2008 (where that national Code has been adopted locally) to most rooms of the home. The areas left out of the requirement were garage, bathroom, kitchen, and laundry; these were already required to have ground-fault protection for receptacles. It is relevant to AFCI circuit breaker troubleshooting that most AFCIs have a level of ground-fault protection built into them as well. (When this level becomes standardized to meet Code for GFCI protection, such AFCIs will make it possible to meet both AFCI and GFCI codes simultaneously.) A standard breaker will trip for an overload, a short circuit, or overheating at itself (the first three causes below).

To solve their tripping usually involves sorting out which of these three causes is at work. But with an arc-fault breaker, there can be two additional causes to add to the list (the fourth and fifth below): Which of the five causes has tripped an AFCI breaker can be quite important in how you go about solving the problem. Some AFCI brands may have an indicator on them that will show (if you haven't already reset!) whether the cause of the last trip was an arc-fault or not. But you will still need to know what to fix and where. The table below also shows some additional causes having to do with the breaker itself or with long-standing things about the wiring in the house.Text from this point on may have disappeared (just as the whole website could some day), but you can download the whole website for offline use (with no disappearing text) for $10. A F C I    S Y M P T O M Trips within 5 sec. Trips in 1 min. to 1 month Trips when any small load runs on the circuit

Trips when some-thing runs on another circuit Never trips, even when "TEST" is pushed Reduce wattage in use on circuit Replace AFCI and put in diff. location in panel (4) Neutral shared with another circuit AFCI's own white goes to neutral bar, circuit white to "load neut" NOTES to narrow down which cause: To tell whether immediate tripping is from a ground-fault versus a short circuit, you might have to temporarily replace the AFCI breaker with a standard breaker (putting the solid white wire from the AFCI's terminal into the panel's neutral/ground bar). If the standard breaker holds, then the problem is more often a ground-fault, less often an arc-fault. In the case of an arc-fault device introduced into an existing home, a common cause of tripping will be that the neutral of the circuit is mixed somewhere with the neutral of another circuit ["(4)" above]. The two common places this mixing of neutrals would occur are at a 2-gang or 3-gang switch box where both circuits are present, or in a 3-way switch system where the neutral for the light(s) has been borrowed (improperly) from the other circuit.

Although I have never yet been called to find the location of an actual arc that was tripping an AFCI, here is what could be done. As long as you do not leave it in place beyond your time of vigilant searching, a standard breaker could be put in the panel in place of the AFCI. You might then be able to hear, see, or smell signs of heat or arcing; blinking lights on the circuit would give additional clues. I am comfortable suggesting what might sound like playing with fire, because few cases of arcing are ever able to start fires. In most homes (most don't have AFCIs), when arcing at connection points ("series" arcing) has been happening for a while, it does commonly show itself eventually as a partial outage of the circuit, from the arcing point on. This can then be troubleshot more easily. Some appliance models, during their normal operation, have been known to trip an AFCI, by its sensitivity to either arcing (in flat-screen TV, vacuum, other motor) or to ground-faults (in treadmill, fluorescent lights).