They say there is no place like home...

And "they" are very right.

Gina and I are back at home finally. We have been away from the house for like 3 weeks. The dogs were very excited to see us, almost as excited as Gina was to see them.

I had a brief scare when I looked at the thermostat. It read 78 but the request was 75. We had a scare right before we left. I had been choking the AC system. I had forgotten to change the air filter for quite some time.

Anyway, I shut the system off for about 20 minutes while I went and opened up the outside unit, the same way the AC repairman had done last week. I saw a little bit of wetness on this one piece (i will have to look it up and find out what it is specifically) but not as much as had been there previous week. He had said the wetness comes from ice forming on the coil, which is a sign of the system being under too much pressure.

When they were finishing up they read the temperature of the air coming out of the vents using one of these...
.

Anyway, the guy last week had borrowed a small wire brush to clean off the outside unit from a TON of dust. So when i opened it up and saw that only a small piece of the system had been cleaned off, I went and got the brush and cleaned off the rest of that area. I think I will need to take a better look at it tomorrow morning and clean the rest.

Anyway, since I don't have one of those fancy guns, I got out the ladder and inserted my remote meat thermometer into grate.

It started out reading a wonderfully cool 72 degrees and has slowly lowered itself down to about 64 degrees. So I am fairly certain that the AC is working and cooling the house. However, I am afraid that the AC is being hampered.

When they were here they put in about 3 lbs of freon as they said it was down that much. When they had left the AC was blowing a comfortable 56 degrees. Course that was at like 10pm.

I recently reviewed the ACC (austin community college) and they had HVAC class. Since I am pretty comfortable calling myself an Amateur Plumber, maybe I need to become an Amateur AC tech.