AC not cooling: repair or replace?

Start with what actually failed

An air conditioner that runs but does not cool has failed in one of four places, and the four are not close to each other in cost. The cheap end is electrical: a start or run capacitor, a contactor, a blower or condenser fan motor. These parts are inexpensive, sit on most service trucks, and are replaced in a single visit. The middle is airflow and heat transfer: a filter nobody changed, an evaporator coil packed with dust, a condenser coil packed with cottonwood. This is labor with almost no parts, and it is the single most common cause of a system that is running hard and delivering nothing.

The expensive end is the sealed system. A refrigerant leak, a failed compressor, or a corroded evaporator coil all mean opening the circuit. That is a different job, with recovery, a vacuum, a charge by weight, and a leak search that may or may not find anything. The fourth failure is not the air conditioner at all: a thermostat wired wrong, a tripped float switch on a full condensate pan, or a breaker that has been off since the last storm.

So the first useful question is not repair or replace. It is which of those four it is. A diagnostic visit answers it, and that visit is worth paying for even if you then replace the system, because the diagnosis tells you whether you are replacing a unit or a whole system.

The age line, and why twelve years

Twelve years is not a rule of physics. It is where three things tend to line up. Manufacturer parts warranties on residential equipment commonly run five to ten years on the compressor and coil, so past ten you are usually paying for the part as well as the labor. Efficiency standards have moved enough that a system installed before the last two rounds of minimum efficiency rules is meaningfully more expensive to run. And a system that has already had one sealed-system repair has a materially higher chance of a second one.

Under twelve years, repair almost always wins. The system has remaining life, the part is likely under warranty, and a capacitor is not a reason to spend thousands. Over fifteen years, a sealed-system repair almost always loses, because you are buying a year or two on a machine that is out of parts support and out of efficiency. Between twelve and fifteen, it is a judgement call, and the honest version of that call weighs how long you intend to stay in the house.

The refrigerant question

If the nameplate says R-22, the calculation changes before age enters it. Production and import of R-22 ended in the United States in 2020 under the Environmental Protection Agency's phaseout. Only reclaimed and previously produced stock remains, which means the price of a large recharge is unpredictable and rising, and a leak repair on an R-22 system is a bet that the leak was the only one. A system with a significant R-22 leak is usually a replacement decision regardless of what the age table says.

Newer systems have their own version of this. The industry has moved to lower global-warming-potential refrigerants, and equipment charged with the outgoing blends will eventually face the same slow squeeze. That is not urgent today, but it belongs in the arithmetic on a system that is already borderline.

What to ask the contractor before you decide

Ask for the specific failed component by name, not a category. Ask whether the part is under manufacturer warranty and who pays the labor if it is. Ask for the measured static pressure and the refrigerant charge, because a system that was never commissioned correctly will fail the same way again on new equipment. Ask whether the replacement quote is based on a room-by-room load calculation or on the size of the box currently sitting outside, because a replacement sized off the old unit inherits the old unit's mistake.

And ask for the repair quote and the replacement quote in writing on the same visit. A contractor who will only give you one of the two is answering a question you did not ask.

What this site can and cannot tell you

We publish the labor figure above and the contractors on record in your metro area, ordered alphabetically. We do not publish an equipment price, because equipment price depends on tonnage, efficiency, refrigerant, duct condition, and local labor in a way no directory can honestly average. Where another organisation publishes a cost range, it is linked in the sources below rather than copied here.