AC issues... maybe a relay?

We bought our house just a bit more than a year ago. The rooftop unit is about 3 years old.

Last summer, during monsoon season (Phoenix, AZ), it was fairly decent outside, so I shut it off for a while that night and opened the doors while it was raining. A bit later, the fan kicked on. The only way to get it to shut down was to put the thermostat at its max temp (90).

This went on throughout the "winter" so we just kept the thermostat set either really high or really low to keep it from kicking on.

We had a home warranty, but having just bought a new house, my wife changing jobs, sick dogs and other expensive life issues, we didn't have the money for the warranty company's service charge until recently.

The guy came out and said the only thing he could see that may have been wrong was a relay, so he changed that. Its been about a week and a half, the home warranty has expired and tonight, the AC either froze up or is having some other issue.

It was working fine until about 6:30 or 7pm. At 6:15pm, I walked my wife outside as she was leaving for work and the wind had picked up. Cloudy and a hint of rain in the air. Not overly humid, but still humid.

I came inside and was looking through reddit and after a while, the air seemed a bit stale and warm. I chalked it up to just my imagination, but then it didn't change and the AC hadnt kicked off in a while, so I got up and checked the thermostat. It read 80, but was set for 78.

It could be frozen, but I don't really have any way of checking that (in our old apartment, the ac froze up all the time during monsoon season) right now. There was some water dripping from the pipe out back, but not much.

Could the relay cause compressor issues? Is there a way to thaw that monster from inside? (At the old apartment, we could just turn the fan on and it would defrost the beast pretty quickly.)

submitted by /u/Lilacbean
[link] [comments]