How To Fix An AC Unit That Is Not Turning ON! TOP 3 REASONS WHY! DIY

so it's summertime it's hot your ac unit is not turning on stay tuned i'm gonna show you how to fix it [Music] welcome to fix's house if you're new to the channel please consider pressing the subscribe notification bell so you could always be in tune on diys how-to videos and product reviews that i do within this channel so let me tell you a quick story on how my ac unit went out it's summertime here now in the pacific northwest we just got home the house is a little bit warm i go to my temperature control unit i turn on the cool and the fan seems to be working well it was blowing inside my home but it started getting hotter and hotter looks like the hot air from the outside was just getting blown in i went down to my vents and there was no cold air coming out so i go outside i check on my ac unit right here this is actually a heat pump as well so you can have either heating and cooling i go outside here and it wasn't turning on like it usually does at this point the easiest fix that i can show you today is make sure you go and check your circuit breaker so if you go look at your circuit breaker and you see that that the your heating and cooling unit has been tripped it's on red that means that's just a quick fix just go and reset it and go test it out see if it turns back on and your problem is solved if you're unlucky like me it wasn't that easy fix i went to my circuit breaker i saw that the circuit breaker was tripped i reset it but still there were no power gunning fed into this ac unit so now we're gonna go to option number two this problem number two is actually the most common problem that most ac owners have when it comes to their ac unit so let me go show you what's going on and what i did to fix it what you want to do first is locate where the wires or the power is getting fed from so if you go circle around your ac unit right here you're gonna notice that there's two lines that are going right here the ones that's important is where the wires are getting fed so if you follow this power line right here this is the panel that's pretty much where all the 220v volts are going through all the way to this panel right here this house is under renovation so don't mind the different colors not all ac units have this panel right here sometimes it's directed to your your circuit breaker panel so if you need to turn off your ac unit through there do that but if you have something similar to this let's go and i'll show you how to open it like that so in this case you can actually take this off if you wish or you can just leave it like that there are many versions on this kind of panel on this one it's fairly easy disconnect the 220 volts feeding to the ac unit again to do this all you have to do is you got to pull this out like so so by pulling this out this connection there's no more power being fed onto your ac unit this is the safety feature that you need to do so you don't electrocute yourself all right so take this out put this in the safe condition somewhere where it doesn't will not get wet or dirty or destroyed and we're good with that one so while i was doing my diagnostic i found two issues the first issue that i found was that if you open this up right here while i was looking right here notice that there are two 30 amp fuses right there now different models come with different types of fuses so make sure you check which amperage or fuses that you need for your certain model for this model that i have i have 230 amp fuses if you don't know what the fuses do they're used to protect the electrical components and wiring from excessive amperage which can damage either the motors the switches and wiring so a blown fuse usually indicates another issue and took the damage so that more expensive components wouldn't need to be replaced i actually hold the old fuses right here look how old they are i mean you can't really see them but inside of these are blown out very easy to take out you just pop them out and pop the new one in given these are the maintenance stuff that you need to check on your ac units so these are the pretty one of the easiest fixes that you can do make sure you get the right model for your ac unit we just popped out the old ones and replaced them with the new that was actually one issue out of the two issues that i have the next issue that i have is i'll show you what we're gonna do now is we're gonna follow this panel and we're gonna go and trace it to the unit all right so it looks like it ends right here depending on which model you have sometimes you might have to take out the whole panel in this model looks like we only have to take out this little screw right there this right here and i should be able to pop out this side so we can get access to the components in here i'm using a 5 16 socket so if we just pull this off you take this panel out you can get access to all the wires the one that we're focused on is this right here so what you're actually seeing right there is called the capacitor it's the ac capacitor it's pretty much it gathers up all this energy right it gives a sudden jolt of energy and electricity to the ac unit for the motor to start this actually was the new capacitor that i just replaced this was the old capacitor right here looking at this old capacitor you can see that there are numbers written all over here the numbers that we're going to be looking at to test this capacitor are these micro farads right here let me give you a here there are two numbers 55 and 55 slash five so 55 is the compressor rating and the five is the fan rating so when we test this out with our meter this is what it's supposed to be close to reading it if you look at the top right here common usually have four prongs on there now if you look at the herm the herm is usually a three prong that's pretty much the compressor motor and then you have the fan so the fan free straight forward that's the fan motor or heat pump condenser now this was made specifically for this ac unit that's why it only has three but the one i put in is a universal one i'll leave the universal one on the link down below if you need a universal capacitor what we're going to do now is we're going to test the compressor rating so that's going to be this 55 first okay so we're going to go and set our meter to mfd or whichever your capacitant section is on your meter and what you're going to do is you're going to take your common your black you're going to put it onto the c where the common touch that and you are going to the other one is going to go to the herm which is the compressor motor so you're going to touch that and i'm going to show a picture on here i can't hold the camera and the meter same time but i did this while it was still on on the unit and i'll leave a picture on the right side and that's what i was reading right there so if you can go check right there it was actually reading a 14.12 so that's way below our 55 marking so that's actually an indicator already that this is going bad or it's already bad now we're gonna go test for the fan rating put the comment again in the comment and now you're gonna put the other one on the fan so the fan is this one so if you look on the picture on the right i came with 4.8 so 4.8 um so that's not bad that's actually probably still good knowing that this is five so the 55 compressor rating was well below 55. we already know that this thing right here was our main problem and that was why this was not turning on so this needs to get replaced the easiest way to change this out is before you take out all those connectors right there before you take any of them out take a picture so that you can copy it and put it on the section right here since this is a universal capacitor notice how there's different types you don't need to buy a specific one this will fit most of the ac units out there okay so i'll leave a link on the description down below if you want one of these universal ones this is around 54. on amazon if you go and have a person an ac unit guy come here he's going to charge you 400 plus for just to install and put this on when you can get this for 54 on amazon i'll leave the link on the description down below pretty much just copy the connection through here connect it through there put it back on secure it so let's go close this up and we are gonna go and you can just throw this away let's put back the cover so i got my son here he's my future ac unit guy and looks like he got the panel back on good job dude high five all right okay so once you get the panel on take that little connector that you took out from the panel and then you can insert that back on it's a safety feature push that back in like so connection should be things back on it's live no more touching that ac panel right there and you can just close this up like so you can put your lock so nobody can tamper on that so why does the ac capacitor go out why does it get blown out well for my situation what happened was we actually had a plumbing leak inside the home and the house smelled really bad from the sewage so my wife and i we opened up all the windows and we ran our ac um on the whole time so we can get all that nasty air out of there so we had this running for two days straight and it finally gave out so that's what's pretty much what happened if the system overheats that can cause your your capacitor to blow out and with you know with normal items like what you see here these units they do get old we've been here for six years now and yeah we haven't we don't know what the old owner did or how much they maintained this life happens you get you know you get your other stuff that you need to take care of and yeah systems get old and you just have to maintain it so this is one of them that you have to maintain other issues might be short circuits and power surges depending on where your areas are that can cause a failure as well two indicators that will definitely let you know that your ac unit's not working is you go out here definitely nothing is working you don't hear anything and the other one is definitely if you hear a humming sound so once again friends that's how you do a quick fix and easiest way you can do to diagnose if when your ac unit is not working it's your capacitor and your fuses and your circuit breaker so those three things i want you to check all right so this by doing that that can save you thousands from having someone to go over here and charge you where you can do it yourself so easily alright friends so if you found this video helpful friends please hit that big thumbs up subscribe notification bell and i'll see your friends on the next video which comes into cleaning the coils so you can have better airflow so stay tuned for that video [Music] you

Channel: Fix This House

Views: 62,531

Keywords: How to fix an ac unit that is not turning on, HVAC Unit, air conditioning, heat pump, AC unit, thermostat meter, ac capacitor, heating and cooling, ac condensor, ac cooling coils, ac repair, air conditioning repair, air conditioning DIY, air flow, indoor cooling system, indoor cooling, furnace install, AC how to, AC home repair, Do it yourself, DIY AC unit, fix this house, HVAC repair, HVAC DIY, microfarad, volt meter MFD, capacitor replacement

Id: 8sDPd6bDLek

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 20 2022