Takes about a minute. No obligation.
Electricity in Texas ran 14.94 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2024. A dirty coil or a low charge makes the compressor work harder to move the same amount of heat out of your house, and that shows up on the meter every single cycle it runs. In El Paso that meter is spinning most months of the year. A unit that's losing efficiency doesn't announce it. The bill just climbs, a little at a time, until it's normal.
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
The filter is the one part you can check yourself without opening a panel.
Swap it out when it's gray and matted, and the coil behind it stays cleaner between visits.
A tune-up catches a dirty coil or a low charge before a summer's worth of cycles runs up the bill behind it. Electricity here already runs 14.94 cents per kilowatt-hour. Getting the unit checked before it starts working is the cheaper way to find out something's wrong.
Find a contractorHalf the homes in El Paso County were built in 1988 or later. If yours is one of them, the AC is still well inside the age where a yearly check keeps it running the way it was built to. A unit that age isn't fighting worn parts yet, so maintenance now is mostly about keeping it that way, not catching something already going wrong.
A healthy system runs a full cooling cycle and shuts off. If yours is kicking on and off every few minutes, something is making it think the house is cooled before it actually is, or the compressor is struggling to start. Either way it's worth a look before that wear turns into a failed start capacitor.
A working AC pulls moisture out of the house as it cools. If the house feels damp or sticky even when the temperature seems right, the coil may be icing over or the airflow across it has dropped. The cooling still feels like it's working, but the system is already struggling.
A tune-up checks the refrigerant charge, cleans the coils, tests the capacitor and tightens the electrical connections.
A tune-up starts outside, at the condenser. The tech pulls the panel and checks the capacitor, the part that gives the compressor and fan motor the jolt they need to start. A weak one still starts the unit most days, so you won't know it's failing until it doesn't. Inside, they check the refrigerant charge against what the system is supposed to hold, not just whether it's cold. Too little and the compressor overworks. Too much and it can send liquid back into the compressor, which it isn't built to handle. They'll check the contactor for pitting, clean the outdoor coil of whatever's packed into the fins, and check that the blower is actually moving the air the system was sized for. Every reading gets checked against a number the manufacturer already set, not guessed at.
