We got home about midnight Saturday night and Claude immediately dropped the temperature on the air conditioner to our normal temperature while I check phone messages. He did note that the temperature was way up in the 80 degree range. This was a lot hotter than what he left the air conditioner set for.
Ususally we begin to feel the change in temperature quickly. We did not feel that happening. We headed on to bed and thru the night it didn't cool off like it should have. By Sunday morning we knew we had a problem.
We headed off to Church and didn't get home until about 3pm in the afternoon. It was sweltering. Claude tried breaker switches and looking at the air conditioning unit outside. Nothing seemed amiss from what we know to check.
Sunday evening we were still at 85 degrees in the living room at 11pm. We had all the windows open and all 4 ceiling fans upstairs going to try and circulate the air.
Amazingly, we slept fairly well. During the night the temperature dropped to a more comfortable range.
We got up this morning and Claude called the air conditioning repair people. They assured us they would come out this afternoon.
Well, our cheerful repair guy showed up about 5:30pm. He and Claude discussed what had happened and what Claude had checked. Then they headed outside to look at the unit on the side of the house.
A bit later Claude came in with a bemuse and amused look on his face. He came into my sewing room and said, "You are NOT going to believe this." Now, knowing we have a repairman and a broken air conditioner, I begin to see HUGE dollar signs.
Then Claude informed me something had made a nest INSIDE the air conditioning unit outside. Whatever it was took the mulch from the beds along the side of the house and fixed up a nest that wrapped itself around all the wires and things. Claude said I really needed to see this. He also informed me the repairman had gone to his truck for his camera. I grabbed my camera and headed outside with Claude.
I couldn't believe my eyes. This is what I saw.
There is a little hole at the bottom left corner with a red wire running into it. This hole opens into the big unit sitting on the concrete slab. There are some holes in the bottom of the big part of the unit so that rain water can run on outside the unit. We believe our little critter came in one of the holes in the bottom of the big unit when it was cold, worked its way up the top and found the hole into a warm spot with all these wires. Then it made repeated trips to gather the mulch from the beds along the side of the house to make a nest. The little guy didn't know he was doing this around 240 volts of electricity.
First our repairman removed the nest.
Then he found 'The Critter'.
Yes, that's right folks, we had a mouse in the control box of the airconditioning unit. Somewhere along the line he (or she) stepped wrong and zhzhzhzhzhzhzhzhttt...fried mouse!!!
Our air conditioning repairman just stood in the blistering heat after working all day in that heat fixing air conditioning units and said to Claude, "Well sir, you have just made my day!! I've never seen anything like this in my 12 years of working on A/C's." He shared several stories of larger critters and bugs in various places. He had NEVER seen any of these make a nest in the control box before. I'm sure in the A/C world this will be a great story to share and have braggin' rights to.
The capacitor was broken, a little work and $331.69 dollars later, we can now have air conditioning. This is an expensive little mouse!!
So..."What do air conditioners & mice have in common?" Apparently...not much!!
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