I’m sitting in my sweltering kitchen waiting for the repair technician to finish repairing the central air conditioner for the house. Last Tuesday, my wife and I turned it on for the first time this year only to discover that it didn’t work!

I called our energy company the next day (Wed), and asked them to come out and fix it. We have a service contract with them for repairing our major appliances (furnace, water heater, etc) and I was thinking we had added the air conditioner to that contract when moved here. It turns out, I forget to make that call and they told me that I didn’t have a contract for it. Figures! They could still do the repair, but they would bill me for time and materials for the repair. I added the air conditioner to our contract so we wouldn’t run into this again and scheduled the repair.

On Friday morning, a repair technician showed up to do the repair. After 45 minutes of diagnosis and repair, he thought he had the problem all taken care of by replacing the capicitor that is used to start the fan motor and the compressor motor. He fired it up and the unit began to run. It ran perfectly….for about a minute….and then the fan motor stopped again. UGH! Now it needed a new fan motor too.

After a half hour on the phone, it turned out that there wasn’t a fan motor that was an exact fit for this unit anywhere within the five state region, so he said he thought he could make it work with a slightly bigger motor — one that they actually had in stock. Good! He called for the delivery of the part and said as soon as it gets there, give them a call and they’d get someone out to get it repaired. The part was delivered to my house about four hours later and I called to schedule the install. The best they could do was to have someone here on Sunday, and they could only narrow it down to sometime between 8AM and 4PM. UGH!! Even worse — it was 93 degrees on Saturday and it was forcast to be even hotter on Sunday.

I’ve spent the day sweltering in my house waiting for the air conditioner guy to show up. He’s finally here and it is (hopefully) almost done. The motor is in and he’s wiring it up now. Keep your fingers crossed.

–Pete