Most of these arrived by phone before they arrived on this page. Marcus's answers, in Marcus's way: the system explained as a chain, no question treated as a sales opening. If yours is not here, call Call for same-day help and ask Angela, or send it with the estimate form. Answering is free, like the estimate: free, hassle-free, and no-obligation.
The AC runs all day but the house never gets cool. Why?
Because making cold and delivering cold are two different jobs, and your system is losing at one of them. Work the chain in order. Refrigerant low enough, usually from a slow leak, leaves the coil unable to carry the house's heat load, so the system runs forever at part strength. Airflow strangled by a loaded filter, a matted coil, or a weakening blower means the cold that does get made never reaches the rooms. And on the hardest Houston afternoons there is a third, honest possibility: a correctly sized system holding the line at 78 indoors against 102 outdoors and full sun is working as designed, not failing. Run time, temperature split, and pressures separate those three stories in one visit.
There is water around my indoor unit. Is it serious?
In Houston, treat it as the urgent one. Your system pulls gallons of water a day out of humid air, and all of it leaves through one drain line. Algae and dust narrow the line all summer, and when it clogs, the pan fills and the water goes where gravity sends it: through an attic ceiling, down a closet wall, across a garage floor. If your system has a float switch it may shut itself down first, which reads as a dead AC and is actually the switch doing its job. Shut the cooling off if water is actively spreading, note where the unit sits, attic, closet, or garage, and call. The drain is the failure; the chain walk checks what running wet did to the rest of the system while it was at it.
The power came back after a storm and now the AC will not start. What happened?
Outages end with a voltage event, and the small electrical parts absorb it: capacitors, contactors, boards. A system that kept up before the storm and is silent after it is usually reporting one of those links, not a dead system, and the repair is usually at the kinder end of the table. Two cautions. If the outdoor unit sat in standing water, say so before anything is energized; flood changes the order of the work. And if the system trips a breaker repeatedly after the outage, stop resetting it and call: a breaker that keeps tripping is reporting, not malfunctioning.
What does AC repair typically cost around Houston?
Budget by ranges, and let the diagnosis set your number. Around Houston, most AC repairs land between $200 and $900. The most common job, a failed capacitor, typically runs $150 to $350. A contactor typically runs $200 to $450, a condenser fan motor $250 to $700, and refrigerant leak repair with recharge $600 to $1,800, because leak work scales with where the leak hides and which refrigerant your system uses. A compressor typically runs $1,250 to $2,900 and opens the repair-versus-replacement conversation. A full AC replacement, installed, typically runs $5,000 to $10,000. The full table sits on the AC repair page.
My house cools, but it feels damp and clammy. Why?
Because cooling and drying are related but separate jobs, and your system is doing the first one too fast to do the second. Air dries only while it moves across a cold coil, so a system that short cycles, or one oversized for the house, hits the thermostat number and quits before it has wrung the air out. Airflow set wrong and a thermostat fan left on ON, recirculating air across a wet coil between cycles, can add moisture back instead of removing it. Houston indoor air should sit near the middle of the comfort range for humidity; a house that feels like a cave in August has a run time or airflow story, and it is measurable in one visit.
My system turns on and off every few minutes. What is that?
Short cycling, and it is a symptom with a list behind it, not a diagnosis. On the cooling side: a failing capacitor letting the compressor stumble, a charge off its mark, a condensate safety switch interrupting the run as the pan fills, or a thermostat fooled by a nearby supply vent. On the heating side: a filter choking airflow until a safety limit trips, or a system oversized for the house, heating its own small world and satisfying itself. What unites the list is wear. Every start is the hardest moment in a motor's day, and a system starting forty times an hour is aging in fast motion. It is worth a visit in the week you notice it, not the month it stops entirely.
We have a heat pump. Why does it run all day in a cold snap?
Because moving heat is slow work in cold weather, and a Houston cold snap is the coldest work your heat pump ever does. A heat pump pulls heat out of outdoor air, and as that air gets colder there is less to pull, so the system runs longer and leans on its backup heat to hold the line. Long run times and backup heat cycling on are the design working as designed. The behavior that earns a call is different: outdoor ice that builds and never clears during defrost, the house losing temperature hour by hour, or backup heat carrying the house alone for days, which shows up on the electric bill before it shows up anywhere else.
Do you cover my town?
The map is the Houston metro, run by corridors: Houston itself is home base, and the vans run Katy, Sugar Land, The Woodlands, Pasadena, Pearland, League City, Cypress, Spring, Humble, Kingwood, Missouri City, Deer Park, La Porte, Friendswood, Tomball, Richmond, Bellaire, Baytown, Conroe, and Clear Lake. If your town is just outside that list but inside the metro's orbit, call and ask Angela. Corridor days reach farther than the printed map some weeks, and a house one town past the line is a conversation, not an automatic no. The full map, with each town's own page, is on the service areas page.
The system is old. How do I think about repair versus replacement?
Think in chains and in seasons. A system with a sound compressor, a coil that holds its charge, and a failure in one link is usually a repair, even at fifteen years old, because the rest of the chain still has life. Replacement becomes the honest conversation when the failure is the chain itself: the compressor gone, the coil failed, or a system whose refrigerant and parts have left the catalogs, so each repair buys less time than the last. Houston adds one local factor: at roughly 2,200 cooling hours a year, a Houston system ages faster than the same system in a mild climate, so age here is measured in hours as much as in years. Ask for the repair price and the replacement price in the same conversation, with the chain evidence for each, and decide on the numbers. That conversation is free here, like the estimate.