Takes about a minute. No obligation.
Electricity in Texas ran 14.94 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2024. That rate applies whether your air conditioner is running clean or straining to do the same job. A unit with a dirty coil or a low refrigerant charge pulls more power to put out the same cooling, and here that difference shows up fast on the bill. A tune-up catches the weak capacitor or the clogged coil before it costs you all summer. Skip it, and the system still runs. It just runs more expensively.
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
May is when cooling starts in Ector County, and it runs straight through to September.
Get the tune-up done in April, before the system has to work.
Most of these signs show up before the system quits for good. The air coming out of the vents feels warmer than it used to, even with the thermostat set the same as always. A room that used to cool down fine now lags behind the rest of the house. The outdoor unit cycles on and off more than it needs to, instead of running a steady stretch and shutting off. It takes longer to bring the house down to temperature than it did last year, and you notice the system is running most of the afternoon instead of resting between cycles. Sometimes there's a new sound, a hum from the contactor or a rattle from a fan blade that's come loose. None of these stop the house from cooling today. They're what a tune-up is supposed to catch before the day that it does.
Get the tune-up scheduled before the season gets going. It's the cheapest way to keep Texas's 14.94 cents per kilowatt-hour from adding up on a unit working harder than it should.
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Five months of running flat out, with afternoon highs near 95°F for most of that stretch, doesn't leave much slack for a weak part to coast along unnoticed. Get the tune-up on the calendar before May, while there's still time to catch what's wearing thin.
A dirty filter chokes off airflow across the indoor coil, and a starved coil can ice over even when the house is hot. Once ice builds up, the system stops pulling heat out of the air at all. The filter is the easiest part to check and the easiest one to forget.
The outdoor coil has to shed heat to the air outside, and fins packed with dirt or debris make it work harder to do that. The drain line carries away the water the indoor coil pulls from the air, and when that line clogs, water backs up into the pan and some systems shut themselves down rather than let it overflow.
A tune-up checks the refrigerant charge, cleans the coils, tests the capacitor and tightens the electrical connections.
A real tune-up starts with the technician actually reading the system, not just looking at it. That means checking refrigerant charge against the manufacturer's spec, not just confirming the lines are cold. It means measuring static pressure in the ducts, so airflow across the coil is actually verified instead of assumed. The capacitor and contactor get tested under load, since a capacitor can read fine sitting still and still fail the moment the compressor draws on it. The condenser coil gets washed, not wiped, because packed-in dirt between the fins doesn't come off with a rag. The condensate line gets flushed clear. Electrical connections get tightened, since a loose one generates heat right at the lug. Anything less than that is a filter change with a invoice attached.
