Seeing any amount of ice or moisture on your air conditioner can be a pretty alarming thing. It wasn’t there yesterday, or the day before that, so how did ice and this much moisture accumulate all of a sudden? Well, it’s quite complicated and requires a bit more than a sentence or two as an explanation. That’s why we’ve got our blog!
When temperatures are humid, there can be a lot of moisture in the air. Your air conditioner cycles through it while simultaneously cooling the air in your home. For reasons we’ll state below, things can get hampered in a variety of different ways, and ice can begin to form on the condenser coil of your air conditioner. Don’t worry, this is a fairly common problem, and we urge you to turn your air conditioning in Caledon, ON off, and call our team for quick repairs.
How the Moisture Gets There
In order to create ice, we need two ingredients–water and cold temperatures. Without one of them, we’re dealing with a completely different problem! So, let’s try and problem solve a little bit to see how we got here in the first place.
Water comes not from the rain or from a flash flood, but from the atmosphere! When your air conditioner cycles through the air in your home to cool it, that causes water vapor in the air to condense along the evaporator coil of the air conditioner. This is supposed to drip down and drain out of your home through a condensate pipe. However, this is where we need to talk about the second ingredient–the cold temperatures.
Sub-Zero Temperatures
If your air conditioner isn’t properly sending air out of the system, due to a clogged air filter or some other issue, then temperatures will continue to cool in the small space within your system. Think about your air conditioner using all of the power it would normally need to cool your home, and instead cooling an area the size of your freezer. You can probably see what we’re getting at.
Now, mix these new cold temperatures with the influx of condensed water that has just appeared from the atmosphere, and you’ve got the perfect situation for ice to grow. Now that we know where it comes from and how it appears, we need to talk about what might cause this to happen.
Clogged Air Filter
Did you know that a clogged air filter can cause ice to grow inside of your air conditioner or along the condenser coil? The air filter is supposed to filter contaminants so they don’t dirty up the system’s coils, but a clogged air filter can inhibit that air flow and cause air to get too cold inside of the system. Make sure you change out your air filter every 1-3 months to avoid this.
Refrigerant Leak
Refrigerant leaks can also cause ice to grow, since there’s not enough refrigerant in the system to easily disperse the heat outdoors. The cold refrigerant will continue to cycle through your system, causing temperatures to drop even more than they should.
Call Peatson’s Heating and Air Conditioning Ltd. to have your iced-up air conditioner repaired.