The Battle of the AC

Last week we noticed that it was getting a little warmer in the house, and I realized that I hadn't heard the AC kick in on awhile. Occasionally there was an odd buzzing sound and then it quit, but I just though my wife was doing laundry and it was the obnoxious buzzer on the dryer. By about ten at night we looked at the thermostat and it was reading somewhere in the upper 80's or so. The buzzing was the AC trying to come on without any success. I ventured downstairs to see what I could find and discovered ice on the pipe leading to the furnace. I figured that we'd give it a night to thaw out and see if that was the deal.

The next day I left for work and didn't think much of it. I got home and noticed that the ice had all melted and figured I'd see if it would fire up again. It wanted to. I could hear it thinking about it, but not much had changed. I just turned it off and figured we'd deal with it later. Funds are low and looking at parts it was going to be more than a couple of bucks to get anything. I had a friend come over and tear into the furnace to see what the deal was. The blower motor was pretty toasty and had about an inch of fur and dust bunnies on it. After clearing it all off and slapping it all back together the blower would come on and give a slight breeze through the nearest vent but that was all it would muster. It was so tired it wanted to be retired. Not having the funds we'd have to suffer in the heat.

Not having AC means the house is going to be hotter than outside during the day. Luckily we have a basement that is about 10-20 degrees cooler than upstairs so we lived down there. It got to a point where even downstairs was approaching 80 degrees or so. I was mentioning not having AC to a coworker who happened to owe us a favor. She volunteered to get the motor for us. The motor showed up yesterday!

After work yesterday afternoon I ripped into the furnace (after studying on youtube of course). I took a pile of pictures so if I really screwed it up I'd have something to run off of as far as what wire went where. After sweating away for an hour or so I had managed to pull out the old motor and stuff the new one in. There was one problem. One of the motor braces didn't quite line up with the hole the screw was supposed to go in. I was hot and sweaty and getting pretty bothered at this point so I improvised. I made it fit. The screw is now on a bit of an angle and the poor rubber bumper thinger ma-whacker is suffering a great deal but the motor is in place and it isn't moving around. Now to see if my efforts were worth anything. I made my way upstairs and turned on the thermostat to cool......nothing. I changed it from auto to on......It fired up! I turned it back to auto and cranked the temperature down to 78 or so. Glory be! I'm not as mechanically retarded as I thought. It helps me to see someone tear it apart first. I wouldn't have been comfortable trying it without having an example first. We now have AC again. The house is no longer a killer 96 degrees.