A Little Weekend Work

When we woke up Sunday morning, Luann noticed that the air conditioning had iced up in the air handler so she turned off the thermostat but left the fan on in order to defrost the evaporator core. About an hour later, I noticed that the air conditioner still sounded like it was struggling, so I checked the outdoor unit and the compressor was still running. Apparently, the contactor relay had welded shut and would not turn off the outdoor unit, so I had to trip the breaker and replace the contactor.

Here's the old contactor. You can see the rectangle thing in the middle which is supposed to move the contacts up and down, but the contacts were jammed down, so I had to replace it. The welding of the contacts are a direct result of intrusion from black ants. When I took this thing out, there was a bunch of dead ants piled up in there. Ants in the contactor are the number one reason for an outdoor unit failure.

So, I bought a Florida-style contactor that has a sealed chamber around the contacts in order to keep the ants out. The swap-out only took about 20 minutes to complete and we were back in business.

I also decided to get a little artistic with the Camaro, so I took out several pieces from under the hood and painted them with candy-apple red. It might look a bit orange in the picture, but the paint is actually a deep ruby red that seems to have lightened up when I used the flash on the camera.