Air Conditioning Repairs in Cairns

A repair is not a service

The two words get used interchangeably and they are different jobs. A service is scheduled maintenance on a unit that still works: clean it, check it, hand it back running. A repair means something has failed. If your system has stopped cooling, trips the breaker, ices up, drips inside, has started making a noise it did not make last year, or is showing an error code on the wall controller, that is a repair and this is the page for it.

What actually fails on units up here

The fault list in Far North Queensland skews differently to the rest of the country. Within a few kilometres of the water, salt eats the aluminium fins on the outdoor coil. Once the fin corrodes away from the copper tube the coil stops transferring heat properly, and the unit loses capacity quietly for years before anyone calls it a fault. Inland toward the cane country the same coil packs with ash and dust and does the same thing faster.

Capacitors are the most common electrical failure we see, and they fail more often in a climate where the compressor runs most of the year rather than three months of it. After that: condenser and indoor fan motors, failed thermistors and sensors, blocked condensate drains, seized contactors, control board faults, and refrigerant loss from a leak somewhere in the circuit. Mould through the barrel fan and across the evaporator is close to universal here by the end of a wet season, and it is usually an airflow complaint before it is a smell complaint.

How the diagnosis runs

Two things are worth checking before you call, because both are common and both take a minute. Is the filter blocked, and is the isolator switch on with the breaker still in. Past that, the work needs a licence. Opening a sealed refrigeration circuit legally requires refrigerant handling accreditation, and the electrical side needs an electrical licence, which is less about paperwork than about mains voltage and the charge a capacitor holds after the power is off.

On site the sequence is measured rather than guessed at. Supply and return air temperatures, running current against the nameplate, system pressures where the circuit has to be accessed, and the physical condition of the coils, drain and fan. That narrows it to an airflow problem, an electrical failure or a refrigerant loss, which are three very different repairs with three very different costs. Anyone quoting before that has been done is guessing.

When we will tell you not to repair it

Sometimes the honest answer is to stop spending money on it. A unit still running R22 is on a refrigerant no longer imported into Australia, so a leak repair on one of those is often uneconomic and sometimes not possible at all. R410A is now in phase-down too, which pushes the cost of gas for older systems up every year. A failed compressor on a system past about ten years is usually the end of it, because the compressor represents most of the value in the machine. A corroded indoor coil gets the same answer.

We would rather say that than sell you a repair we do not believe in. Peak failures run December to March, when everything is loaded hardest and everyone calls at once, so if something is not right it is worth getting looked at before the season. To book a diagnosis, call 0489 266 523.

If it has failed in the middle of the build up and the house is genuinely unlivable, say so when you call. That is emergency air conditioning repair and it is handled differently from a booked repair.