A/C issues

It's been over 100 for the last four days. The house A/C has been working pretty hard. Filter is only two weeks old.

Woke up this morning with water running from under the unit, all the way through the garage and out of the garage door. The filter is soaked.

What's going on? Should I let it run today while we are gone? Gonna be over 100 again today.

The condensate line is probably stopped up with algae.

In reply to Toyman01:

Off of the unit? How would one go about cleaning it?

I usually find the end of the pipe outside, slip a piece of hose over the end and suck on it.

At the unit end should be a cap that you can pour a little bleach down to kill the algae.

Inside should look something like this.

I have to do it to mine about once a year, but forgot to last year. Had similar issues and ended up doing the bleach thing and also blowing into the tube (as opposed to sucking from the other end). Look outside, probably near the condenser unit, for a tube with water dripping out. Or, after you pour bleach through it, sniff for the smell of bleach.

Had SWMBO watch the tube as I blew into it and she said a bunch of junk blew out and got all over her shoes. A/C seemed to work much better after that.

-Rob

I put a shop vac on the condensate tube once to clear a nasty line. The drain pan was full of water, which kicked the unit out of cooling mode once the water reached the float switch. Once the line was clear the pan drained quickly, problem solved.

I tried the "sucking on the outside line" thing a couple times. Now I have a length of clear tubing hooked up to a blower nozzle for my compressed air. Fire up the pancake compressor for my air nailer out at the garage, get it full, bring it inside, then feed the tube into the drip outlet from the tray in each unit (we have a split system), hold a towel around it for any "splash" and trigger the air. Our drip lines are 3/8" or 1/2" so the air seems to be enough to do it.

Before that I was trying a brush on the end of a length of fish tape. That was a Bad plan. :)

Mine once got stuck so bad the vacuum on the end wouldn't clear it. I had to go under the house and pull the lines apart to break a calcified turd at a junction. My lines have blocked a few times. The first time was when I was going to bed at midnight and saw water dripping out of a light. That's not supposed to happen. I ended up dragging a water house through the house, into the attic to blast if from the top. The handler was angled such that it and dripped out of the duct work down stream and missed the drip tray completely. Thus, the switch didn't shut it off.

Ran home at lunch and cleared it. Shop vac on the outside and air pressure on the inside. Pulled a bunch of think algae out like Toyman said. Dumped some bleach down after to try and kill what may be left.

Thanks all!