AC repair · San Antonio, TX
AC not cooling in San Antonio? Get help today.
Tell us what the system is doing and local HVAC companies pick it up. It takes about a minute, it costs you nothing, and your phone number stays private until a company pays to open the request.
What this work involves
AC repair in San Antonio, TX
AC repair covers everything between "it runs but the house is not getting cool" and "it will not start at all". In practice most calls land on one of six things: a failed capacitor or contactor, a refrigerant leak, a blocked condensate drain, a seized or failing compressor, a bad blower motor, or a control fault that has nothing wrong with the machinery at all. Which one it is changes the bill by an order of magnitude, which is why a technician diagnoses before quoting rather than after.
A visit normally starts with the easy eliminations — thermostat, breaker, filter, float switch — then moves to measurements: supply and return temperatures, static pressure, refrigerant pressures and superheat, and electrical readings at the outdoor unit. The point of the measurements is that symptoms lie. A system low on refrigerant and a system with a filthy evaporator coil both present as "blowing warm", and treating one as the other wastes a trip.
If a company tells you it needs refrigerant, ask where the refrigerant went. A sealed system does not consume it. Adding gas without finding the leak buys you a season at most, and on an older R-22 system it buys an expensive season — US production and import of R-22 ended on 1 January 2020, so what is left is recovered or stockpiled stock and it is priced accordingly.
Is this your problem?
Common faults and what they usually mean
- Running constantly, never reaches the setpointUsually low refrigerant, a dirty coil, or a system that is simply undersized for a triple-digit afternoon. Check the filter first — a clogged filter does this on its own and costs nothing to fix.
- Outdoor fan spinning, indoor air warmCompressor is probably not running. Often a capacitor or contactor, which is a same-day part on most units.
- Nothing happens at allBreaker, the switch on the air handler, a blown low-voltage fuse at the board, or a tripped condensate float switch. Worth checking the breaker and the drain pan yourself before anybody drives out.
- Water on the floor or a ceiling stain under the air handlerThe condensate drain is blocked and the pan is overflowing. In a long cooling season this is one of the most common calls there is, and it does real damage to drywall if left.
- Ice on the refrigerant line or the indoor coilAirflow restriction or low refrigerant. Switch the system to fan-only to thaw it before a technician arrives — frozen solid, nothing can be measured.
- Short cycling — on and off every few minutesCould be a control or sizing problem, could be an electrical fault about to become a compressor failure. This one is worth not ignoring.
Local conditions
What makes San Antonio different
The cooling season here is long. Air conditioning does real work from roughly March into October, and summer afternoons sit at or above 100°F for weeks at a time. That has two consequences for repair. First, run hours accumulate fast, so parts that would last a decade in a mild climate do not. Second, when something fails in July every HVAC company in Bexar County is already booked, and the gap between calling and getting a technician is at its widest exactly when the house is at its hottest.
The heating side is the reverse. Winters are short and mild enough that heating equipment runs comparatively little, which is why a furnace fault here is often discovered on the first genuinely cold night rather than during the season. If a technician is already at the house for an AC repair in autumn, having them look at the heat is close to free.
A practical point about scheduling: on a 100°F afternoon the useful question is not "who is cheapest" but "who can actually come". Describing the fault once and letting several local companies decide whether they can get to you beats ringing round five of them yourself and hearing "Thursday" five times.
What happens next
If you send a request, this is the whole process
You describe the fault
Four or five questions: what stopped working, how urgent it is, the kind of property, and your ZIP code. It costs nothing and you are not committing to anything.
Local companies get the request
It goes to HVAC companies that cover your ZIP code and are taking work. Nobody pays to be sent a request, so you are not being routed to whoever bid highest.
They contact you
A company that wants the job pays to open your contact details, then calls or emails you. Until one of them pays, nobody has your phone number — not even the companies the request was offered to.
Repair or replace
Which one is actually the right call
Repairing is usually right when
- The unit is under about ten years old and has not had a major failure.
- The fault is electrical — capacitor, contactor, relay, board. These are cheap parts and a correct repair is a genuine repair.
- It is a blocked drain, a failed float switch or a dirty coil. Maintenance, not end of life.
- The compressor is still within a manufacturer parts warranty. Check before you accept a replacement quote — the part may cost nothing.
- You are selling the house soon and need working cooling, not a new system.
Replacing is usually right when
- The compressor has failed on a system past roughly twelve years.
- It uses R-22 and has a leak. You are paying scarce-refrigerant prices to refill a system that will leak again.
- You have paid for two or more significant repairs in two years.
- The repair quote is a large fraction of a new system and the unit is old. One rule of thumb contractors use: multiply the repair cost by the age of the unit in years, and if the result is uncomfortably large against replacement, replace. It is a heuristic, not arithmetic — treat it as a prompt to get a second quote.
- The system has never cooled the house properly. Replacing a badly sized or badly ducted system with the same thing again reproduces the problem.
Get the diagnosis and the repair quote in writing before you discuss replacement, and be wary of a company that arrives for a no-cooling call and leads with a new system. A replacement quote should come with a load calculation, not a guess from the badge on the old unit. Efficiency ratings also changed on 1 January 2023, when SEER2 replaced SEER as the federal metric, so quotes written before and after that date are not directly comparable on the number alone.
After hours
When it cannot wait
Safety first, comfort second
Heat is a health problem before it is a comfort problem. If the house is climbing through the 90s indoors and someone there is elderly, very young, pregnant or has a heart or respiratory condition, treat it as urgent and say so when you describe the fault — then get those people somewhere cool while you wait rather than waiting it out.
Two things genuinely warrant stopping the system rather than running it: a burning smell or visible scorching at the outdoor unit or the air handler, and a breaker that trips repeatedly. A breaker that keeps tripping is telling you about a fault, not misbehaving. Switch the system off at the breaker and leave it off.
While you wait, close blinds on the sun side, run ceiling fans, and set the thermostat to fan-only if the coil is frozen. Do not set the thermostat 20 degrees lower to "make it work harder" — it cannot, and on a system with a failing compressor it only extends the damage.
Questions
Straight answers
- What does it cost to use this?
- Nothing. Homeowners never pay us. HVAC companies pay to open a request they want, which is where our money comes from. You will still pay the company you hire for the actual work, on their terms.
- Who gets my phone number?
- Nobody, until a company pays for the request. Companies covering your ZIP code are shown that a job exists and what kind of job it is; your contact details are released only to a company after it has paid. If no company pays, nobody has your details.
- Are the companies on this site licensed and insured?
- We do not know, and we will not tell you otherwise. We do not verify licences, insurance or backgrounds, and nothing on this site should be read as saying we have. Texas regulates air conditioning and refrigeration contractors through a state licence — ask for the licence number and a certificate of insurance before work starts, and verify them with the issuing authority. Any company that objects to being asked has told you something useful.
- How fast will somebody contact me?
- It depends entirely on how busy local companies are, and in a San Antonio July that is very busy. We cannot promise a response time and we are not going to invent one. Marking the request as an emergency helps, because companies choosing between requests can see it.
- Can I ask for a specific company?
- Not through the request form. If you already know who you want, use the directory, find them, and contact them directly — that is faster for you and we would rather you got the job done.
- Should I just buy a window unit instead?
- For one room, in a heatwave, while you wait for a part — honestly, yes, and nobody here loses anything by saying so. It is not a fix for a failed central system, but it makes one room survivable, which sometimes is the whole problem you are trying to solve this afternoon.
What we are
How HVACChamps actually works
HVACChamps is not an HVAC contractor. We do not repair, install or service equipment, we do not employ technicians, and we do not send anyone to your home. We connect people who need work done with independent HVAC companies who do it, and those companies pay us when they want a request.
That means the company that contacts you is a separate business, running its own insurance, licensing, pricing, warranties and staff. We do not inspect them, we do not vet their credentials, and we do not describe any listing as verified, licensed, insured or background-checked, because we have not checked. Ask for licence and insurance details before work starts, and ask for the quote in writing.
Rather look through the companies yourself?
The San Antonio directory lists local HVAC companies with their own phone numbers and websites, so you can call whoever you like directly.