The lights are back on. Do not touch the thermostat yet: an after-the-outage guide

The night of August 30

Hurricane Idalia crossed the Big Bend on August 30, 2023, and by that night the Suwannee Valley Electric Cooperative had lost nearly all of its roughly 28,000 meters. Eleven hundred poles were down. Two weeks passed before the last farm roads in Suwannee County had power again. Through all of it the heat did not stop: afternoons in the 90s, nights that never dried out, houses shut up with no way to move air.

We learned a great deal in the weeks after about what a long rural outage does to an air conditioner, and the biggest lesson was this: most of the systems that failed did not fail during the outage. They failed when the power came back, or in the month after. This guide is written as branches for that moment.

When the lights come back: before anything else

Whatever your situation, do these first, in order.

1. Leave the thermostat off until the power has been steady for at least thirty minutes. Restoration on a damaged co-op line is often flickers, partial voltage and a few false starts before it holds. A compressor trying to start on half voltage is how capacitors and windings die.
2. Look at the outdoor unit for debris in the fan, limbs on the cabinet and standing water around the pad. Clear what you can.
3. Check the breakers for the air handler and condenser. If either tripped during the storm, reset it once.
4. Then turn the system on and stand near the outdoor unit for the first minute. It should start within a few seconds, the fan should spin, and the sound should be steady.

If it starts and runs normally

Then let it run and watch two things over the next day: whether the house actually cools and dries, and whether the unit cycles normally rather than stopping and starting every few minutes. If both are fine, schedule a check before the next season anyway; see the first FAQ for why.

If it hums, clicks or will not start

Then the restoration or the storm itself has taken out a run capacitor, a contactor or a control board. Set the thermostat to off and phone us. Do not keep trying; each attempt stresses the compressor. These were most of our post-Idalia calls, and they are usually small repairs.

If it ran on a generator for the outage

Then it has had two weeks of power that was probably dirtier and lower than the grid’s, and possibly a dozen start-ups on a generator that was at its limit. Have the electrical side tested: capacitor values, contactor condition, compressor amp draw against its rating. A compressor that struggled to start on a small generator may work this week and fail in October. The gated one-acre homes at Eagle’s Pointe west of town were built with whole-home generators, and those units carry the same risk if they were never matched to the condenser’s locked-rotor draw. If you will run on a generator again, this is the moment to add a soft-start module and confirm the generator’s real capacity against the unit’s start-up draw.

Call 866-266-5709

If lightning or a surge came with the storm

Then look for the signs even if the unit runs: a thermostat that reset itself, a tripped surge protector, a burnt smell at either cabinet, a breaker that tripped during the storm. Boards and capacitors damaged by a surge often keep working at reduced margin until a hot afternoon finishes them. A surge protector at the outdoor disconnect, installed afterward, is inexpensive and stops the next one.

If the house was shut and hot for more than a week

Then the air conditioner may be fine and the house may not be. Two weeks at 85 degrees and 80 percent humidity with no air movement grows mold on closet walls, inside the duct, on the evaporator coil and down in the drain pan. Open every interior door and closet, run the system continuously for a day or two to pull the moisture down, change the filter after that first day, and have the coil, pan and duct inspected if there is any musty smell that does not clear.

Getting ahead of the next long outage

The co-op feeder that winds through the pines between Dowling Park and Luraville will go down again. Three things make the next long outage cheaper:

• A surge arrestor mounted at the condenser disconnect.
• A soft-start module on the compressor if a generator is in the picture, and a generator sized to the real start-up draw, connected through a transfer switch.
• A maintenance visit each spring so the capacitor and contactor going into storm season are not already weak.

Cook’s serves Suwannee County from its Palm Coast shop, 144 miles from Live Oak, and worked the county through the Idalia recovery. Dispatch is staffed every hour, and the bill ignores the clock.