Took a trip last week with some buddies of mine. Drove down to Texas from Wisconsin, and stayed at an AirBnb in Grand Prairie, right outside of Dallas/Fort Worth. The Thermostat was set to 90 upon entering the home, took half the day for it to reach temp (72 degrees). Everything was fine and dandy until about 1:30AM on Day 4.
Woke up to one of my buddies yelling some obscenities that would make the mightiest of sailor’s blush. Walked into the room, and there was water pissing from the ceiling. Poor guy was fast asleep when the built-up water ruptured a hole in the ceiling, and then proceeded to pour out onto his face. I immediately rushed upstairs to the bathroom above, and checked all PVC pipes and drains…no leaks. As I was headed back downstairs, I noticed the Air Handler was running. So, I set the t-stat to “Off” as an experiment. Sure enough, the pouring water eventually turned into a slow leak, and then a drip. Turned the thermostat back on, and the drip turned back into a torrential downpour again.
Mind you, I heavily debated taking my tools with me, as I normally do whenever I go on vacation. But for some reason, I decided not to bring them because nothing has ever come up where I needed to use them. (The ONE TIME I don’t bring them!)
Fast forward 15 minutes, and there I am; Can Opener and 10mm socket in hand, trying to remove the return grille underneath the air handler. (Turns out the 10mm socket had a 1/4″ female adaptor on one end, and the tip of the can opener fits PERFECTLY inside the flathead slot the return grille screws had on them…who would’ve thought?!?!) Finally got the grille removed and imagine my surprise when I saw the drain pan, 24″ Diameter and 3″ Deep, filled to the brim and overflowing into the trusses between floors!
I spent the next hour or so using our red solo cups to slowly empty the drain pan before I could physically remove it and dump it out. Then I decided to open up the door to where the Air Handler was sitting. Bad Idea. I was completely shocked at how poorly of a job the previous company did. It was a relatively new unit, so when they changed out the old one, they left all the previous high/low voltage wires exposed, copper and all. After slowly maneuvering my way through an electrical minefield and moving all the wires out of the way, I was able to get at the drain. This is what I saw:
Apparently, whoever changed the filter last, had a bone to pick with Isaac Newton and his fundamental laws of gravity. I tilted the drain back in a way that Sir Newton would be proud of me, then I decided to change the filter as well because it looked terrible. The Air Handler called for a 24x30x1 filter, so naturally, when I pulled out the current filter, it was 20x20x1. I took a look at the inside of the coil to find this beautiful site:
At this point I was completely fed up with having to deal with these easily preventable problems at 4:30 in the morning. I replaced the filter (with the correct size) and put everything back the way it was. The unit ran perfect the remainder of our stay.
The morning after, I decided I’d reach out to the homeowner in an attempt to have some money shaved off of our stay. (I mean I DID perform $300-400 in service work and also helped prevent thousands of $$$ more in water damage for this lady.) She said she was extremely thankful that I was there and that she didn’t know how to thank me enough. To show her thanks, she prolonged our checkout time from 10AM to noon…and the cleaning lady was not informed so she showed up at 9:15 that morning and entered the house while we were all still asleep.
You just can’t get away when you’re in the HVAC business…