When should I call for emergency AC repairs?
Call immediately for burning smells, smoke, sparking, water pouring from the air handler, or a breaker that trips repeatedly. Call the same day if the house is above about 80F with an infant, an elderly or a heat-sensitive occupant. Everything else can usually wait for a normal booking.
What counts as an emergency, and what does not
- A burning or hot-electrical smell
- Smoke, or visible scorching at the disconnect or panel
- A breaker that trips again as soon as you reset it — reset it once, never repeatedly
- Water running from the air handler into the ceiling or wall
- A loud metallic grinding or screech from the condenser
- Ice visibly built up on the refrigerant lines and the system still running — shut it off at the thermostat
- No cooling at all with an infant, an elderly or a heat-sensitive person in the house
- Indoor temperature above about 80°F and climbing
- No cooling during a heat advisory
- A float switch that has shut the system down and keeps doing so
Everything else — a system that cools but not well, a noise that is annoying rather than violent, a bill that has crept up — is a normal booking, and you will pay less for it. After-hours calls carry a premium on top of the researched $75–$150 diagnostic fee.
August, and hurricane season
Two Casselberry-specific things worth planning around.
Heat. The cooling season here realistically runs March to November, with average highs of 91–92°F in June, July and August and overnight lows of 73–75°F — the house does not cool down at night. A failure in August is a genuinely different event from a failure in February, and it is worth knowing before it happens who answers the phone at 7pm.
Storms. Atlantic hurricane season runs 1 June to 30 November and peaks around 10 September. The post-storm pattern is predictable: surge damage to control boards, condensers shifted on their pads, and a restart queue that is days long. Condenser tie-downs and a surge protector are cheap before the season and unobtainable during it. Casselberry is roughly 40 miles inland from the Atlantic, so salt-air coil corrosion is not a factor here — do not let anyone sell you coastal coil coating on a Casselberry house.
Five safe checks
What you can safely check yourself before calling, in about two minutes: is the thermostat set to cool and below room temperature; is the indoor unit’s breaker on and the outdoor disconnect in place; is the filter clogged; is the condensate float switch tripped (a full drain pan or a safety-switch light); is the condenser coil packed with clippings. Those five account for a large share of no-cooling calls, and none of them require opening an electrical panel or touching a capacitor, which holds a lethal charge after the power is off.
Anything past that point is licensed work. The symptom pages walk through each fault in order of likelihood.
System down in August?
Say the indoor temperature and who is in the house when you call. That is what decides the order of the day, not who called first.
Phone: (689) 308-3675 · Monday-Friday, 8:00 AM - 5:00 PM
Where the facts on this page come from
Every figure above is either a primary-source document or a named third-party cost guide. All of it was checked in September 2026. Fee schedules, rebate amounts and market prices change without notice — if you are about to spend money on one of these numbers, open the source and check it.