The actual readings — suction and liquid pressure, superheat, subcooling, the supply-to-return split, static pressure — written down, in range or out of range, next to what they should have been. Including the readings that told us not to sell you anything.
Six readings out of range and two in. The two in range are a run capacitor and a condensate float — which is to say, the two things easiest to sell to somebody who cannot check. They were checked. They were fine. They are still fitted.
The system runs and runs and the thermostat sits at 79 with the sun long gone. Somebody was out in June and said it needs a pound.
The office calls you back to agree a time. Before that call ends you get asked to check two or three things yourself, because if a tripped breaker or a blocked drain float fixes it, you should not be paying us for the drive.
Fan on, cooling off, and forty minutes spent on the filter, the coil face, the ducts and the drain while the coil thaws. You cannot read pressures through a block of ice, and anybody naming a cause while it is still frozen is guessing.
A sealed system does not consume refrigerant. If it is low it is leaking, and adding more sends the same gas out of the same hole at your expense. That request goes on the report declined, at $0.00, with the reason. Nitrogen and an electronic leak search go on instead — and yes, on the day that costs more.
Weeping at the liquid service port: a part worth a few dollars, and the hour spent finding out which one it was is the part you paid for. Charge weighed in to the nameplate, then read back on superheat and subcooling rather than on pressure. As left, on your copy: split 19°F, superheat 11°F, subcooling 9°F, each one printed beside the number it should have been.
That is the whole product: the night you get back, and the readings that say why you got it — including the ones that were fine. The run capacitor measured 34.6 µF against a 35 µF rating. Nobody sold it to you. It is still fitted.
| Work performed | Amount |
|---|---|
| Nitrogen pressure test and electronic leak search Condenser coil, evaporator, line set, both service ports. System pressurized to 350 psig with dry nitrogen, held and walked with the detector, then soaped where the detector alarmed. Schrader core at the liquid service port weeping. | $189.00 |
| Schrader core, liquid service port Core replaced, both port cap gaskets renewed. The cores are a few dollars. The hour finding out which one it was is the part you are paying for. | $14.00 |
| Evacuate and weigh in charge Pulled to 480 microns, isolated, 10-minute decay test held at 510 — that is a system with no leak left in it and no moisture. Charge weighed in to the nameplate: 6 lb 4 oz R-410A. Then read back and confirmed on superheat and subcooling, not by pressure. | $318.00 |
| Blower wheel cleaned, filter rack sealed Wheel loaded with dust on the trailing edge of every blade — a wheel in that state moves noticeably less air and no gauge shows it. Return boot had a finger-wide gap pulling garage air. Sealed with mastic. | $95.00 |
| “JUST TOP THE REFRIGERANT UP” — DECLINED Requested and not done. See the note on this report. | $0.00 |
| Run capacitor — measured, not sold 34.6 µF on a 35 µF rated part. That is inside the ±6% tolerance printed on its own case. It is a good capacitor. It stays. | $0.00 |
| Duct static pressure — written down, not quoted 0.78" w.c. total external against a system designed around 0.50". That is a duct problem and it is real, but it is not today's problem and you did not ask us for it. It is on the report so it is on the record, and so the next reading has something to be compared to. | $0.00 |
| Total | $616.00 |
AS LEFT — superheat 11°F · subcooling 9°F · split 19°F (supply 59, return 78) · low side 118 psig · high side 342 psig · float switch dry · retested 25 min after charge settled.
Gauge pressure on its own tells you almost nothing. A charge is verified against the manufacturer's target for that system — superheat on a fixed-orifice system, subcooling on a TXV system — and on this job both were read, because the two of them together are what tell you whether refrigerant is the problem or a symptom of something else.
On this system the subcooling had collapsed to 2°F. A TXV holds superheat steady right up until it runs out of liquid to meter; when the subcooling goes, the superheat climbs. That pattern is a low charge, and a low charge on a sealed system is a leak. It is not a diagnosis you can reach by touching the vent.
“JUST TOP THE REFRIGERANT UP” — DECLINED, $0.00. Requested and not done. A sealed system does not consume refrigerant; if it is low, it is leaking, and adding more sends the same gas out of the same hole at your expense. We put nitrogen and a leak search on it instead — the line above — and found the Schrader core weeping at the service port. That is a part worth a few dollars.
It is also not a close call legally. Knowingly venting refrigerant to the atmosphere is illegal under Section 608 of the Clean Air Act. A truck that adds a pound every summer and never looks for the hole is not giving you a cheaper option; it is charging you annually for the same leak and releasing the gas on the way through. A leak gets found, not fed.
These are how a charge is actually verified. A system is charged to the manufacturer's target for the metering device it has — not by matching a pressure to a chart on the side of the truck, and never by standing at a register saying it feels cold. Feeling cold is a 30°F split on a system that is icing and a 19°F split on a system that is right; your hand cannot tell those apart and a thermometer can.
Ours are on every report, as-found and as-left, with the target beside them.
Return air temperature minus supply air temperature. On a working residential system in Florida humidity it lands roughly between 16 and 22°F. Much lower and the system is not doing the work — charge, or airflow. Much higher and it is usually not moving enough air, which is the road to a frozen coil.
Two thermometers and five minutes gets you that number. If a contractor will not tell you what your split was, ask why they did not take it.
Most residential duct systems are designed around half an inch of water column of total external static pressure. A great many measure far above it, and that is a duct problem being sold as an equipment problem — the blower is fighting the house, not failing.
We measure it on every call and put the number on the report. A blower struggling against bad ductwork will kill a brand-new system just as happily as it killed the old one, so we would rather show you that before you spend money on equipment.
The same rule runs through the water side of the business. A water heater with a dripping temperature-and-pressure relief valve does not need the valve capped, and anybody who caps one should not be in your house — that valve is the only thing standing between a failed thermostat and a tank that becomes a projectile. Usually the drip is thermal expansion in a closed system with no working expansion tank, and the fix is the tank, not the valve.
And the discharge pipe from that valve has to terminate somewhere a person can see it, ending near the floor, unthreaded, full size, running downhill the whole way with no trap in it. If it discharges into a pan under the tank or out of sight in a wall, the one warning you were ever going to get is a warning nobody receives.
We will not add refrigerant to a system with a known leak and call that a repair. We will not quote equipment before measuring what the ducts do. We will not replace a capacitor that measures inside tolerance because the invoice looks thin without a part on it. We will not sell a repipe off one pinhole and a bad feeling, and we will not sell a slab leak repair until the recirculation loop has been ruled out.
None of that is generosity. It is that a report with numbers on it can be checked by the next contractor who reads it, and we would rather it held up.
A symptom is not a diagnosis, and none of these pages will pretend otherwise. Each one says what the possible causes are, which reading separates them, and what we will have to measure before anyone can honestly tell you a price.
One licensed trade owner who still runs calls, and four trucks that cover Hillsborough County and the north edge of Orange. Both trades on the same truck matters more than it sounds: a condensate drain is a plumbing problem living inside an air conditioner, a water heater in a garage shares its air with an air handler, and the person who finds one should not have to hand you a second phone number to fix the other.
We publish our readings and our declined lines, and we do not publish ratings, review counts, job counts or awards, because inventing those is exactly the kind of thing this page exists to argue against. More about how we work →
Tell us what it is doing. We will agree a time by phone, measure before we price, and you will leave the visit holding the numbers.
Scripted demonstration. It cannot book, hold or confirm a time, and it will not quote a price.