Preventative Maintenance: Why You Should Replace Your Capacitor

Preventative Maintenance: Why You Should Replace Your Capacitor

Why You Should Replace Your Capacitor

The capacitor is small but very

for your AC unit to work properly. It’s like a battery, that swaps electrons between two conductive plates. Your unit cycles a lot, so they are turning on and off frequently. They are necessary for your A/C unit to start up because it takes a little bit more energy than just the homes electricity. Basically, they are designed to store energy and kind of jumpstart the unit. If recommended by a professional HVAC contractor like ourselves capacitors should be replaced to help prevent any breakdowns to the system or if your unit isn’t working it could be an easy fix for the technician.

Why Changing Your Capacitor is a Good Idea

are small, but they do play a big role and sometimes they fail. More often than not, they will eventually. Here are some reasons why they fail.

Especially living in the valley of the sun we know about being exposed to heat. Now for capacitors being exposed to the heat for long periods of time it really takes a toll on them. So, make sure you can shade your unit as much as possible, so it spends fewer hours in the sun to maximize the life of the capacitor.

Usually a capacitor is designed to last somewhere between 10-20 years, but a lot of different things play a role in the lifespan of them, such as we discussed earlier, like exposure to heat, if the capacitor is undersized, or even if it was built with wrong parts, a number of things play into how long they will last, the good thing is capacitors are not that expensive.

A lot of the time homeowners tend to find they have bad capacitors and take it amongst themselves to change them. Sometimes they pick the wrong one for their unit just trying to save a few bucks. It might seem like an easy fix but in reality, it’s best to have an experienced

take care of it. Each A/C unit calls for a specific capacitor with a specific

rating and when changed themselves, some homeowners don’t always get the one intended for their unit. That can cause the capacitor to short or work even harder and shorten the lifespan of the capacitor. The wrong capacitor can even cause parts to break down and that can lead to system failure.

Most Common Signs of a Bad Capacitor Include:

The Ac Unit Not Blowing Cold Air

A/C Unit Takes Long to Start Once You Turn It on

Humming Sound Coming from Your Air Conditioner