Patch the package unit again, or start over: the cooling choice half of Suwannee County faces

Two ways to spend the next five summers

Picture two homes a few miles apart on the west side of Live Oak. One is a double-wide on an acre off CR 250 with a roof-mounted package unit that was new when the owners moved in; it has had a capacitor, a contactor and two refrigerant top-offs in the last three summers, and it still loses the fight by about four in the afternoon. The other is a 1990s house in River Woods with a split system of the same age; the owners decided last spring that the next repair bill would be the last and replaced the whole thing.

Patching buys another season for the price of a part and a drive. Replacing buys a decade or two of quiet afternoons and a lower FPL or SVEC bill, but costs real money up front. Neither answer is wrong. The mistake is making the choice by accident, one emergency at a time.

Cook’s does every piece of cooling work that choice can lead to: the diagnosis, the repair, the tune-up that stretches a system’s life, the full replacement, and the duct repair that is often the thing actually wrong. This page is the front door to all of it. Below is what to check yourself first, the point where checking should stop, and what happens when we take over.

Before you call: a ten-minute checklist for a Suwannee County house

Most of these take less time than finding the phone number. Work through them in order.

1. Thermostat. Set to Cool, not Auto or Heat; fan on Auto; setpoint at least three degrees below the room. If the screen is blank, change the batteries before anything else.
2. Filter. Pull it. If light will not pass through it, replace it and give the system an hour. In a house on a dirt road or with a dog, a month is the whole life of a cheap one-inch filter.
3. Breakers. Two of them, usually: one for the air handler or package unit, one for the outdoor condenser. Reset a tripped breaker once. If it trips again, stop; that is a call, not a reset.
4. Outdoor disconnect. The gray box on the wall near the condenser. Pull the handle and look for scorching or a blown fuse. Push it back in firmly.
5. Condensate. Look under the air handler, or at the drain pan under a closet unit. Standing water means a float switch has shut the system down to protect your floor. On well water, the line scales up with iron and sulfur deposits faster than it does in town.
6. Outdoor unit. Clear leaves, grass clippings and pine straw from the coil. Make sure the fan on top is turning when the thermostat calls. If it hums but does not spin, do not poke it; that is a failed capacitor or motor.

The point where the checklist ends and the phone call starts

Stop and call when any of these is true:

• The breaker trips a second time.
• You smell anything hot, electrical or sweet near the air handler.
• Ice is forming on the copper lines or the indoor coil.
• The outdoor fan is not turning while the unit hums.
• The system runs continuously and the house never gets below 78.
• Water keeps coming back after you have cleared the pan.
• The system is more than fifteen years old and this is the second call this year.

That last one is the patch-or-replace fork from the top of the page. If you are there, tell us when you call so the technician brings both conversations with him.

Call Cook's for Suwannee County cooling

Every cooling service, one truck, one number

Cook’s runs Suwannee County from its Palm Coast headquarters, so the truck that comes to Live Oak has already committed to the trip. We make it worth the drive by doing the whole job in one visit wherever that is possible, and by carrying the parts the county’s housing stock actually fails on.

You need	What that looks like here
Repair	Diagnosis first, price before parts, no after-hours surcharge. Capacitors, motors, boards, leak searches, drain work, package-unit repairs on manufactured homes.
Maintenance	Seasonal tune-ups timed to the May-through-September cooling season, with a drain treatment matched to well water and a coil cleaning that assumes pollen and dust. Service agreements exist; ask for the tiers and inclusions. [[CONFIRM WITH JERRY]]
Replacement	Load calculation, equipment matched to a 94-degree afternoon with no sea breeze, Lennox as our installed line, free estimate, financing with low monthly payments.
Ductwork	Belly-duct repair under manufactured homes, attic flex replacement in River Woods and Sherwood Forest, sealing and sizing on older downtown homes.
Air quality	Dehumidification, filtration and purification for houses closed up from May to October.
Commercial	Rooftop and split systems for the storefronts along Ohio Avenue, the clinics and the farm offices.

After the truck leaves

A cooling visit ends with three things in your hand.

First, the invoice, itemized, with the diagnosis written in plain words rather than part numbers. Second, a filter recommendation sized to your return and your household: pets, dirt road, pollen season, how many people. Third, a short note on timing: when to expect the next tune-up, and whether the system is on a repair path or a replacement path, in our honest reading of it.

If a replacement is coming, you also leave with a free estimate that includes the equipment, the ductwork changes it needs, and what the FPL rebate program could mean for a high-efficiency install in the FPL territory inside the city, Wellborn and Houston. The rebate pays through enrolled contractors, so ask where Cook’s enrollment stands. [[CONFIRM WITH JERRY]] There is no federal tax credit to count on for equipment installed now; we will not pretend otherwise.

Then the registers get cold, and the next time you think about the air conditioner is when we call about the spring check.