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Electricity in Texas ran 14.94 cents per kilowatthour in 2024. Your AC uses more of it when something inside is working harder than it should, a dirty coil, a low charge, a blower pulling against a clogged filter. None of that trips a breaker or throws an error. It just raises the number on your bill month after month, quietly, until a tune-up catches it.
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
April is when cooling starts in Brazos County.
Get the system checked in March, before it has to work.
Your AC runs from April through October here, about seven months straight. July and August push the afternoon high to 94°F on average, and the system does not get much of a break overnight either. That is a long stretch for a capacitor or a contactor to hold up under full load. Parts that would last a few more seasons somewhere cooler start slipping here instead, a weak capacitor, a coil losing its grip on the heat it is supposed to carry off. Whatever is already marginal in April has the whole summer to get worse.
A tune-up finds the weak capacitor or dirty coil before it turns into a higher bill. Electricity here already costs more than most places. Paying to have the system checked costs less than paying to run it inefficient all season.
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Count the hours on this clip and you get a sense of what the unit is actually holding up under. April to October, it is running most days, and the overnight stretch rarely gives it a full rest once summer sets in. Get it looked at before April so whatever is already marginal gets caught before it spends seven months under load.
A dirty filter slows the air moving across the evaporator coil. A dirty condenser coil can't shed heat as well as a clean one. Neither failure announces itself. The system keeps running, just worse than it should, and nothing about normal use reverses that buildup on its own.
A capacitor that's starting to weaken still starts the compressor, until the day it doesn't. A refrigerant line with a slow leak still cools the house, with less charge every month, until there's not enough left to do the job. A yearly check catches these while they're still a measurement on a gauge, not a no cool call.
A tune-up checks the refrigerant charge, cleans the coils, tests the capacitor and tightens the electrical connections.
A real tune-up means the panel comes off, not just a glance at the thermostat. The tech checks refrigerant charge against what the system calls for, not just whether it's cooling right now. The capacitor gets tested under load, since a weak one can still start the compressor on the bench and still fail once it's carrying the full heat of the day. Contacts in the contactor get checked for pitting, because a burnt contact raises resistance and runs hotter every cycle after that. The condenser coil gets cleaned if it's caked with grass clippings or cottonwood, since a coil that can't shed heat makes the compressor work harder to do the same job. Drain line, blower wheel, electrical connections, each one gets looked at, because any of them can be the thing that turns a working system into a breakdown.
