Some of these answers cost us work. They are still the answers.
No, and it is worth understanding why the answer is not negotiable. A refrigerant circuit is sealed. Nothing consumes refrigerant, nothing burns it off, and there is no normal loss. If it is low, it is outside the system, which means there is a hole. Adding more sends the new gas out of the same hole at your expense — and knowingly venting refrigerant is illegal under Section 608 of the Clean Air Act, which makes the annual top-up a violation somebody is charging you for.
We find it instead: nitrogen at pressure, an electronic detector, soap where the detector alarms. Leaks are commonly a Schrader core, a flare or a corroded evaporator, and the first two are cheap. The evaporator is not, and if that is what it is we will tell you what a coil costs against what a system costs and let you weigh it.
Maybe. It is equally likely to be airflow, and it is one or the other roughly every time. Both make the coil run below freezing. A dirty filter and a dirty evaporator coil cause it identically — both restrict air, less air over the coil means less heat arriving at it, the refrigerant inside cannot boil off, the coil temperature falls below 32°F and condensation on the fins turns to ice. Then the ice blocks the air, which is the original problem, only worse.
Low charge gets there differently — less refrigerant means lower pressure means a lower boiling point — but it ends in the same block of ice. The readings separate them, and you cannot take those readings until it has thawed.
Check the condensate drain first. There is usually a small float switch on the drain line or in the secondary pan, and when the drain blocks it opens the low-voltage circuit and stops the system deliberately, to keep water out of your ceiling. Nothing is broken. That switch is the cheapest thing in your house and it has probably already saved you a drywall bill.
If the pan is holding water or the drain is dripping nothing on a humid day, that is very likely it. It is a real service call — the line wants clearing properly, and the reason it blocked is worth knowing — but it is not a broken air conditioner.
Possibly. A run capacitor genuinely is the most common failure on a residential system — it is an electrolytic part living on a hot rooftop or a hot slab, and Florida is unkind to it. It is also the cheapest thing that fails, which makes it the easiest thing in the trade to oversell, because almost nobody asks for the number.
Ask for the number. A capacitor is stamped with its rating and its tolerance, usually ±6%. If it measures inside that, it is fine. If somebody replaced yours, ask what it measured before it came out. Ours goes on the report either way — on the job on our home page it read 34.6 µF on a 35 µF part and it is still fitted.
It is a capacitor and a relay that give the compressor a bigger shove at startup. There are two honest uses. On a long line set or a system on a weak supply it genuinely helps a compressor that is being asked to start against high head pressure. And on an old compressor that is starting to struggle, it will get you through a summer.
The second one is where the honesty has to be explicit: a hard-start kit fitted to a tired compressor is a walking stick, not a cure. It is a reasonable thing to buy if you know that, and a bad thing to be sold as a repair. We will say which of the two it is.
It is a coin toss, because the old one was sized by somebody who may well have done the same thing. Sizing is a load calculation on your actual house: square footage, orientation, glazing, shading, insulation, infiltration, ceiling height. Replacing tonnage with tonnage just inherits whatever error is already there.
Oversizing is the common one and it feels like the safe choice. It is not. An oversized system satisfies the thermostat quickly and shuts off, which means short run times, and dehumidification only happens while the coil is running wet. In Florida that gives you a house that is 74°F, clammy and unpleasant, with a system that short-cycles itself toward an early failure. Bigger is not safer here; it is worse.
Because a blower can only push so hard. Total external static pressure is the resistance the system sees, most residential equipment is designed around about 0.5 inches of water column, and a very large number of houses measure well above that — undersized returns, crushed flex, a filter grille far too small for the air being asked through it.
A system behind ducting like that moves less air than it is rated for, runs its blower hotter, freezes coils and dies early. If we sold you new equipment without measuring, we would be selling you the same failure with a warranty on it.
No. Never. That valve is the only thing between a failed thermostat and a tank with enough stored energy to go through a roof, and capping one is the single most dangerous thing an unqualified person does to a water heater.
The drip is usually thermal expansion. Water expands when heated; if there is a check valve or a pressure-reducing valve at the meter, that expansion cannot push back into the main, so pressure climbs until the relief valve lifts — doing its job. The fix is a correctly sized and correctly charged expansion tank, and then the valve stops weeping because there is somewhere for the expansion to go. Sometimes the valve itself has failed and gets replaced, which is a cheap part.
And its discharge pipe must run downhill to somewhere a person can see, ending near the floor, full size, no threads on the end, no trap in it. If it drains out of sight, the warning nobody gets is the warning you paid for.
Could be, and it could equally be the hot-water recirculation loop. A recirculation system keeps hot water moving so it arrives quickly at the fixture; on many of them a crossover valve under a far sink fails open and lets hot water run continuously into the cold line. That gives you a warm floor, warm cold water, a gas or electric bill that climbs, and a meter that will not settle — the same story a slab leak tells.
One is an afternoon and a small valve. The other is jackhammers. We rule out the loop before anybody cuts concrete, and it is genuinely surprising how often the loop is the answer.
Almost certainly not, and the two are not even connected. Drains are waste; a repipe is supply. Anybody who bundles those two after looking at a slow shower is selling.
Slow drains in older Tampa houses are usually cast iron, and cast iron does not fail the way plastic fails. It scales from the inside, the bottom of the pipe channels out, the diameter effectively shrinks and it holds solids. Cabling clears it; a camera tells you whether clearing it is a fix or a delay. We will show you the screen and let you decide, and we will say plainly when the honest answer is that this line is finished.
There is a diagnostic charge for a service call and it is told to you on the phone before we come, never discovered on the invoice. It covers the diagnosis and the readings, and you keep the report whether or not you go ahead with anything.
What we do not do is a free call that is a sales visit, priced back into whatever gets sold. A free diagnosis has to be paid for by something, and the something is usually a part you did not need.
No. Copperfield Plumbing & Air is invented, and this site is a demonstration built by Bots On Staff to show a plumbing and air conditioning business what a finished site looks like. The address is not a real street, and every job number and reading on the site was written for the demonstration. The telephone number is ours at Bots On Staff — calling it reaches the people who built this site, not a company that does not exist. The trade content is real; the company is not.
Ask it in the chat in the corner, or call the office and ask a person.
Scripted demonstration. It cannot book, hold or confirm a time, and it will not quote a price.