Oakland County
AC Repair in Royal Oak, MI
A straight shot north from the shop, and the largest city in our service area.
Cooling problems in Royal Oak tend to come from the city's building history rather than from equipment reaching the end of its life. This is the town in our area where houses have most often been extended, opened up, or rebuilt outright, and the cooling system does not always follow. A condenser sized correctly for a 1,400 square foot house in 1996 is not sized for the same house with a rear addition and a finished basement. The system runs continuously, the original rooms are comfortable, and the new space never quite catches up.
What we run into in Royal Oak cooling systems
- Larger renovated houses regularly end up with one condenser sized for the original footprint and an addition hung off the same system, which reads to the homeowner as a unit that cannot keep up.
- Zoned cooling fails in a way that is easy to misread: one floor is fine, one floor is not, and the equipment itself is healthy.
- Variable-speed air handlers need a correctly sized return, and a lot of retrofits never got one.
Getting someone out
For a no-cooling emergency, ring (248) 398-4015 rather than using the form. That line runs 24 hours. Scheduled work, including anything that can wait until the morning, runs Mon–Fri 8am–5pm out of the shop at 1880 E Nine Mile Rd, Ferndale, MI 48220.
It helps to know what you have before anyone arrives. The age of the unit, the brand on the front, and whether it is doing nothing at all or doing something wrong will usually narrow the problem down over the phone.
This page covers what is particular about Royal Oak. For how the work itself goes, what tends to fail, and the repair-or-replace question, see ac repair.
AC Repair in Royal Oak: questions we get
Why does my Royal Oak addition never cool as well as the rest of the house?
Usually because the cooling system was sized for the house before the addition and nothing was resized when the addition went on. The equipment runs continuously, the original rooms are comfortable, and the new space sits several degrees warm. Whether the answer is more capacity, a duct correction, or a separate zone depends on how the addition was tied in.
Why is my AC running but not cooling?
The three usual causes are a refrigerant charge that has dropped because of a leak, an evaporator coil that has frozen over, and a compressor that is not starting. A dirty filter sits behind more of these than people expect, because restricted airflow is what freezes a coil in the first place. Checking the filter costs nothing and is worth doing before you call.
There is ice on my air conditioner. What should I do?
Switch the cooling off at the thermostat but leave the fan set to on. That moves room-temperature air across the coil and thaws it without running the compressor against ice. Then check the filter. Running a frozen system risks sending liquid refrigerant back to the compressor, which turns a modest repair into an expensive one.