Air Conditioning Repair in Pearland, TX
Pearland sits on clay that swells and shrinks with the seasons, and it moves your equipment with it. That produces two problems most homeowners never connect to the soil under the pad.
Call 832-662-4107
Clay soil moves, and your equipment sits on it
Pearland is built on Gulf Coast prairie clay, which swells when wet and shrinks when dry. Over years that movement is enough to tilt a condenser pad, and a tilted pad causes problems that are not obvious.
- Compressors are designed to sit level. Running at an angle over years affects oil return inside the compressor and shortens its life.
- The refrigerant line set gets stressed as the pad moves relative to the house, and line set joints are a common leak point.
- Water pools against the base on a pad that has settled toward the house, which accelerates corrosion at the bottom of the cabinet.
Go and look at your outdoor unit with a level, or just by eye against a fence line. If it is visibly out of level, re-setting the pad is inexpensive and worth doing before it causes something that is not.
Slab foundations and the line set
The same soil movement works on the house itself. In older Pearland neighbourhoods where foundation movement is common, the refrigerant lines running from the outdoor unit into the house pass through a wall that is not entirely staying put.
It is a slow problem rather than a dramatic one, and it shows up as a refrigerant leak that seems to have no cause. If a technician finds a leak at a line set joint or where the lines penetrate the wall, foundation movement is a plausible reason it happened.
The system that runs constantly in August
A common Pearland complaint, and usually not a fault. Air conditioning is sized to hold a temperature difference — typically about twenty degrees below outdoors — not to reach any temperature you set. On a 98-degree afternoon, a correctly working system holding the house at 78 is doing exactly what it was designed to do, and it will run more or less continuously to do it.
Cause for concern is a change: running constantly this year when it cycled last year at the same outdoor temperature. That points at a dirty condenser coil, low refrigerant, or duct losses that have got worse.
Before you call
- Look at whether the outdoor unit sits level.
- Note the indoor temperature and the outdoor temperature together — the gap is the useful number.
- Note whether this is new behaviour or how it has always been.
- Check the filter and both breakers.
More on telling faults apart is on the AC not cooling page.Call 832-662-4107