[heymijo]

> often employing fear tactics and sales quotas to incentivize upsells

This already happens. The most common AC repair needed is a new capacitor. It's a $20 part.

Call your dad's business, you probably get a quote for $100-ish and it's fixed in ten minutes.

Call a PE owned shop and they are likely to tell you that your entire system needs replaced. Quote $5-$8k.

Reports like this are already common place, and the roll-ups of former small-businesses in industry like HVAC that the PE people celebrate will only make this worse for customers.

[Modified3019]

Incidentally, most repairs to an HVAC system are quite self serviceable.

The channel https://www.youtube.com/@WordofAdviceTV/videos has saved me a lot of money.

On a complete tangent on the topic of “home maintenance you should know”, hot water tanks should be purged yearly (to get rid of the debris collecting on the bottom), and have a sacrificial anode rod to stop corrosion and should be replaced every ~3 years (magnesium) or ~5 years (aluminum)

[mordero]

> hot water tanks should be purged yearly (to get rid of the debris collecting on the bottom)

Note that this is only the case if you have been doing this already from when it was new. It isn't necessarily a great idea to try to purge on an older water tank since the valve can start to leak if you open it and it hasn't been used in a long time.

[metaphor]

Some of the things I've personally encountered are attempts to service refrigerant without first weighing tank, and a claim that R-22 systems can no longer be serviced due to EPA refrigerant ban; I suspect these are very common grifts.

Still worse, a brazen attempt to service an older R-22 system with R-410A, which would have completely destroyed a heat pump that I ended up getting an additional 5 years of serviceable life out of (after dismissing that clown on the spot).

Other ridiculous mistakes I've had to deal with are incorrect wiring of air handler emergency heat source during initial installation that prevented system from cooling; and on that same heat pump system less than a year later, discovering an improperly secured lug within exterior disconnect box that eventually created enough heat to fry ~6 inches of insulation before failing open and killing power to compressor (in retrospect, city inspector not only should have caught this, but should have required the contractor to replace the disconnect box altogether to remain in compliance with prevailing residential building code).

The grift has gotten so bad over the years that a few friends---a professional ME and electrician---have gone out of their way to earn § 608 tech certs[1] to legally purchase refrigerant and have sufficiently tooled themselves up to handle common failure modes.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/section608/section-608-technician-certif...

[heavenlyblue]

Here in the UK I think it takes about 10 days to obtain the certification to be able to install AC, plus the cost of approximately 1 AC unit. Installation costs are about 2-3x the unit price, so it's actually massively cheaper to get certified and install your unit than wait for "the professionals"

[dlkf]

Assuming you value 10 days at the cost of 1-2 AC units.

[Cpoll]

If it saves you a single $8k "we have to replace the entire thing" grift, those 10 days can be valued at about a $200k salary ($4k a week).

[bluedevil2k]

Try $250 for a capacitor here in Texas - they know you can’t afford to take a few days to shop around due to the heat. What I’ve found works over the years: get the phone number of a few HVAC guys as you encounter them and offer them $50 to come when you need them. They’ll never pull the “you should cal l my employer” because most are contractors who need to buy their own equipment.

[gh02t]

I had a bad capacitor this past summer and ended up having to drive over an hour because the only place in town that would sell me a capacitor was Grainger on the opposite end of [moderately large town]. Everywhere else I called declined to sell me one for "safety reasons". Several did offer to send a tech out to do it for me...

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

When my AC broke on the weekend, I got a capacitor from Amazon that arrived next day.

[gh02t]

Unfortunately Amazon in my area at the time had been taking a week or more for any deliveries. It was really annoying.

[mmmlinux]

If they have techs they don't want to sell you parts, they want to sell you service. Granger sells parts. Would you call up restaurants trying to buy a raw potato?

[gh02t]

I actually mostly called up HVAC supply places but they wouldn't sell me a cap and offered to refer me to one of their "preferred" service providers. Maybe it's some backdoor colluding in my area, who knows, but yeah I was really surprised they wouldn't. I think I called 3-4 before someone told me Grainger sells 'em.

[bigfatkitten]

It's pretty common for outfits like that to be "trade only" and not do retail sales at all. Electrical wholesalers are often the same.

[sidewndr46]

This is why you call a supply house and not an HVAC company. As long as you aren't trying to buy refrigerant they really don't care.

[lotsofpulp]

> What I’ve found works over the years:

Going to Ferguson.com and ordering a replacement capacitor to have on hand for $30 works even better.

It’s literally just turning off the power to the compressor, using a screwdriver to open the panel, unplugging the old capacitor, and plugging a new one in.

[quickthrowman]

You forgot to discharge the capacitor, the most important step. This is why people who don’t understand what they're doing should not touch an A/C start or run capacitor (or any electrical equipment, really) for any reason.

Please don’t give out dangerous advice, if you want to risk electrocution, that’s your choice. Don’t encourage others to perform work unsafely.

[lotsofpulp]

Good catch, but the point remains that it’s a simple repair most can be prepared for and not have to wait for someone else to come fix it for you.

Maybe print the instructions and leave it with capacitor or watch a couple YouTube videos first.

[smileysteve]

> Maybe print the instructions and leave it with capacitor

The UX to make this consumer replaceable looks more like

1. Add a bleed resistor to the capacitor (its default state when unplugged should be discharged)

2. Use a modern consumer grade connector (ie sealed molex or deutsche)

[7speter]

DIY is a worthy approach, but people have to gauge their own limits.

If you really don't want to run the risk of being electrocuted, it might just be worth the 250 dollars to have someone who does this sort of thing all day to come and do the repair.

[cma]

Seems like you skipped the discharge step..

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Point taken, but pretty good chance that a blown cap isn't too great at holding a charge anymore.

[cma]

And if the capacitor wasn't blown but it was instead a seized motor or something?

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Then why are you replacing the cap?

[lazide]

Just don’t lick it haha

[avgDev]

I've had people come out and look at my furnace because it wasn't turning on properly.

They looked at it for 5 minutes, told me it's too old and needs to be replaced.

It needed a $5 sensor which I replaced myself after doing some basic testing. There are so many grifters in the trades. It is so hard someone honest, that is going to show up on time and do the job.

I almost want to start or buy a construction business.

[TheSleeprAwakns]

If you did that then how would Jira cards move across the board?

[nradov]

Could someone ELI5 why AC capacitors are so fragile? I had one fail last year on a unit that was just out of warranty.

[lazide]

It’s not so much that they are fragile, as they’re a part that gets a lot of very heavy duty use and they’re expensive to make invulnerable. Ain’t no residential customer going to pay for a 100mfd 240v tantalum cap (how big would it be even?).

Think of them like a car starter motor or transmission (for old ICE vehicles).

Assuming we’re talking motor start capacitors anyway. For most of them, every time the compressor starts they see a dead short at 240v for a couple milliseconds, typically in the 10,000+ amps range.

And most people use their AC the most when it’s hot and nasty out. Which doesn’t help.

[halper]

By "mfd", do you mean µF? I have some basic knowledge of electronics and am not familiar with "mfd" in this context but assumed you must mean microfarad.

[lazide]

Apologies, yeah most motor start caps for some reason use mfd to mean micro farads. [https://www.packardonline.com/electrical/capacitor/motor-sta...]

I guess from before the days of Unicode?

µF == the same thing, but tends to be the ‘more correct’ modifier used in electronics and engineering, rather than industrial parts supplier catalogs.

[carlmr]

Oh, wow, this is so bad. m usually means "milli" not "micro". At least they could have used u instead of µ, which is a more common replacement when you don't have the keyboard character available.

[lazide]

Just wait until you see the actual dimensions of a 2x4!

[rasz]

Electrolytic capacitors are a perishable good. Age even when sitting on a shelf unused.

[Log_out_]

You can control when a capacitor will blow, by placing it at a certain distance to a heat source. They do not like heat and you can thus determine the lifetime of a device on a bell curve around time * times constant average use. Nasty but legal.

[sidewndr46]

They aren't. The ones you buy nowadays just aren't engineered to last.

[gh02t]

Most are electrolytic for practical reasons including cost and available capacity+voltage rating. Electrolytes in the capacitors dry out in the hot weather as well as other things like other components going bad and drawing too much current, both of which cause further overheating. Overheating makes the electrolyte dry even faster (making the capacitance plummet and resistance increase, i.e. stop capacitoring) and generate gasses (=>swell/pop).

Tldr hot weather is hard on them. They have a finite lifetime and suffer most when you need the AC the most.

[trq01758]

For AC these units use non polarized, oil-filled metallized polypropylene film capacitors. But overheating is a problem for them, as it is for electrolytics.

[gh02t]

Indeed, I did some basic double checking before I posted but I guess the info I read was bogus+I was also having a brain fart to not know better because you're definitely right. Thanks for correcting.

[Log_out_]

Would be neat to have an AC to keep the electronics nice and cool.

[steve_adams_86]

Are more robust capacitor designs not an option because the capacitive properties of the paper ones are better for the use case?

[ssl-3]

More robust capacitors exist. They just cost more.

In HVAC world, the practical differences between a motor start cap and a motor run cap are price, physical size, and longevity.

A start cap is cheaper, but is meant only for intermittent duty and is unsuitable for use as a run cap.

Meanwhile, a run cap costs more but can serve as a run cap or a start cap.

All things (except for outliers like the McLaren F1) are built down to a price.

[himinlomax]

Aren't electrolytic caps polarized? That can't be used for AC. Iirc these capacitors are film types instead.

[ssl-3]

Non-polarized electrolytics are somewhat uncommon, but they definitely do exist. They get used rather frequently in things like crossover networks for loudspeakers[0].

They tend to cost more, and tend to be larger than their polarized kins. They're not advantageous in circuits that always have some DC bias, so they only get used where it is necessary.

0: https://www.bennic.com.tw/en/ec/index.asp

[sidewndr46]

No one uses an electrolytic type capacitor for the 60 Hz winding of a "single-phase" induction motor.