How We Spend Our Money

Last week, Amy and I went to a Shane & Shane concert at our church while Grammie and Poppa babysat the twins. Amy left the concert a little early and got home before me. When she got there, Amy found water dripping through our dining room ceiling right below where the AC the attic. Amy called me and got her dad investigate the problem.

When I found out this happened, I was kicking myself for not installing a float switch that would shut the AC off when the drip pan filled with water. I expected to go into the attic and see that the drain had clogged, the emergency drain had failed, and the drip pan overflowed. This is the exact situation that a float switch would prevent.

However, this is not what I found in the attic. The drip pan was completely dry and the drains did not seem to be clogged. There was hardly any water to be found. The AC unit itself was slightly damp but that was about it. Gary and I were unsure what had actually happened.

To prevent further water damage, we turned off the AC and headed over to Grammie and Poppa's for a cool nights "sleep." Sleep is in quotes since the twins still do not know how to sleep through the night when away from home. We ended up being there a couple nights while everything was fixed. Grammie took off Monday and Tuesday to hang out with Amy and the kids.

On Monday, an AC guy came by to see what was going on and scheduled it to be fixed the next day. Our AC unit had a lot of problems. Below is an image I drew of what an AC unit in the attic should look like.
Air from the ducts in sucked into the coil that cools the air and pushes the cool air back out ducts to the rest of the house. There is a lot of condensation during the cooling process and, according to the AC guy, our unit could generate around 50 gallons a day. To handle all of the condensation, water flows down the a pipe into our normal water drain. It is common for that drain to become clogged which is why a drip pan and emergency drain exist below the coil. The emergency drain empties water outside at the edge of the roof.

Well, here is what the AC unit in our attic looked like.
The coil and ducts out were improperly installed on an angle. Then, our coil sprung a coolant leak causing some condensation to freeze. This allowed water to make it out of the water collector inside the coil and into the ducts section. Once water made it to the ducts section, it eventually soaked through causing the leak. Also, our drip pan was smaller than it should have been and was barely the size of the coil.

When all of this happened, Amy and I were thankful that our house was still under warranty since we bought it slightly under a year ago. We assumed the warranty would cover most of this. Wrong! It only covered the broken coil. It didn't even cover draining or disposing of the remaining coolant. We were on the hook for doing that and fixing the other stuff like the giant slope of our unit.

We decided to pay to have everything fixed. There were a few things I could have done (like making everything level) but we wanted AC now and I already have a ton of projects. We got a new coil, a larger drip pan, a float switch, had everything leveled off, and had the ducts out cleaned (mildew had grown in their since it is likely this was not the first time water had made it to that section). It took three AC guys around four hours to fix everything.

After all was said and done, the warranty paid around $250 while we had to pay more than $1000! After all that, we were thankful to have our AC back. But, it turned out that we were not thankful for very long. :) Our AC went out AGAIN on Saturday, July 3rd!

The company that fixed it for us was closed for the holiday weekend. Amy talked to the warranty people who said they would send someone out Monday. But my wife was not willing to wait until then. (Go, Amy!) She calmly explained to the warranty person how we have infant twins and that we live in hot Texas. Well, it worked! They found someone to come out that night.

This time, it was an easy problem to fix. That AC guy said the previous repairmen pumped a little too much coolant into our system and the unit overheated. He removed some and everything seems to be working nicely now. Hopefully, it will continue doing so.

Here is a picture of how we like to spend our money. :) I went ahead and labeled it. I should annotated how much each item cost. :) It is a little hard to tell by this picture but everything is now level. I wish I had take a before picture so you could see how there was like a 6 inch drop off from the coil to the ducts out.
Now, we just need to fix the water damage in the ceiling. Thankfully, the damage is not that bad. Just one long crack and some water spotting. I will probably try to fix this myself.