AC not cooling or stopped in Jacksonville

Jacksonville's July normal is a 91.9 °F high and a 73.2 °F low, and July 2025 was the hottest on record at the airport, with 98 °F or higher on more than nine days. A house without cooling in that weather is 85 °F inside by late afternoon and warmer upstairs, and it does not recover overnight. This is the call that does not wait, and the reason the phone answers around the clock.

When you call, say what the system is doing (running but warm, not starting, tripping the breaker, ice on the copper lines, water on the floor), and ask what to switch off until the visit.

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Before the contractor arrives

Three things you can check yourself, as long as the panel is dry and there is no damage or burning smell. Nothing else.

• The thermostat: set to Cool, the setpoint below the room temperature, fresh batteries if it takes them. A blank screen on a hot day is often a tripped float switch in the drain pan, not a dead system.
• The breaker panel: a split system has two breakers, one for the air handler and one for the condenser, sometimes labeled. If one has tripped, the panel is dry and nothing smells burnt, reset it once; if it trips again, leave it off and say so on the call. A breaker that keeps tripping is protecting a motor or a compressor, and the contractor should find out which.
• Ice on the copper lines or the indoor coil: switch the system to Off and the fan to On so the ice melts before the technician arrives. Running a frozen system for hours can finish off the compressor.
• Do not open the condenser, top off refrigerant from a kit, or run the system with the filter out. Refrigerant may only be handled by an EPA Section 608-certified technician, and a recharge kit on an R-410A or R-454B system creates a mixed charge the contractor then has to recover.

What usually stops a system here

The same few parts fail first on the First Coast, and most of them are repairs.

• A failed capacitor on the condenser: the fan or the compressor hums and will not start. The most common July call and one of the quickest fixes.
• A clogged condensate drain line: the float switch shuts the system off to keep water off the floor. Common in closet and garage air handlers from Arlington to Orange Park, and in attic air handlers in Mandarin and the Southside, where the pan overflow shows up as a ceiling stain.
• A dirty or iced evaporator coil, or a low refrigerant charge from a slow leak: cold air weakens over days, then the coil freezes. The contractor finds the leak; adding refrigerant every summer is not a repair.
• A failed contactor, a bad blower motor, or a control board taken out by a power surge, the common call after a summer thunderstorm or a hurricane outage.
• A compressor that has failed on an older system, often 12 to 15 years in this climate and sooner in the salt air at the Beaches: the point where repair-or-replace becomes a real question, and the contractor should give you both numbers.

What the contractor does

Ask for diagnosis first: static pressure and airflow, refrigerant pressures and temperatures, electrical checks on the capacitor, contactor, and motors, and a look at the coil and the drain. A repair on the same visit is possible if the technician has the part; if the system is at the end of its life, ask for a written quote that states the refrigerant it uses and the age of the equipment, so the decision is yours.

A condenser that sat in river or ocean water needs a professional look before anyone turns it on; AHRI's guidance is to replace flood-damaged equipment rather than repair it, and Jacksonville's floodplain rule puts the replacement two feet above the base flood elevation (see the replacement page). The contractor should say which case yours is.