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- Serving Ames, IA & Surrounding Communities
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COOLING
Iowa summers are humid as well as hot, and an air conditioner that is failing usually tells you by leaving the house sticky before it stops cooling entirely. We repair every major brand and install central air, heat pumps and ductless systems.
The busiest week of our year is the first stretch of ninety-degree days, because that is when every marginal air conditioner in Story County gets asked to work hard for the first time since September. If yours struggled at the end of last summer, it will not have healed over the winter.
A frozen coil is worth knowing about because it is the one problem where what you do first matters. Turn the cooling off and leave the fan running to thaw the ice, then replace the filter. If it freezes again after that, the cause is low refrigerant or an airflow restriction and it needs a technician — running it frozen risks the compressor, which is the expensive part.
Cooling equipment lives twelve to seventeen years in this climate. When yours reaches the end, the replacement decision has more variables than it used to — efficiency ratings changed to SEER2, refrigerants have moved on from R-410A to lower-GWP alternatives, and heat pumps now compete directly with straight air conditioners on price.
Our approach is the same as on heating: load calculation first, then a written comparison of two or three real options with the efficiency, the warranty and the rebate all spelled out. No pressure to buy the top tier.
Replacing the indoor coil alongside the outdoor unit is not an upsell — a mismatched coil costs you the rated efficiency you paid for and can void the warranty. We will always quote the matched pair and explain why.
$4,800–$7,000 — Single-stage, matched coil, existing line set where it is serviceable.
$7,000–$9,500 — Better dehumidification and quieter operation. Usually rebateeligible.
$4,500–$8,000 — Single zone installed. Multi-zone systems run higher depending on head count.
Ames has a large stock of older homes, converted rentals and finished attics with no practical way to run duct. A ductless system solves that with a small outdoor unit and one or more indoor heads, no ductwork at all, and heating as well as cooling from the same equipment.
We are a Mitsubishi Electric dealer, and the usual applications here are a bonus room over a garage, a finished basement, a sunroom or addition, a home office that the central system never reaches, or a whole small house that never had ducts to begin with.
Window and portable air conditioners struggle to cool more than the room they sit in, they are loud, they block a window all summer, and portable units in particular dump a surprising amount of heat back into the space through the exhaust hose. If you are running two or three of them to keep a house liveable, a ductless system or central air will cost less to operate and stop the annual installation ritual.
Book it in April or May. We clean the condenser coil, check refrigerant charge and superheat, test the capacitor and contactor, clear the condensate drain, verify the temperature split across the coil and check the filter and blower. A dirty condenser alone can cost you fifteen to twenty percent of your cooling capacity.
SEER2 replaced SEER as the efficiency rating, measured under test conditions closer to how equipment actually runs in a real duct system. Higher is cheaper to operate.
In central Iowa the practical sweet spot for most homes is the 15 to 17 SEER2 range. Going higher is worth it if you run the AC hard, have a large cooling load, or plan to stay in the house long enough for the payback — we will run the numbers for your situation rather than guessing.
Our AC quit in the middle of a run of ninety-degree days and they had it fixed the same day. No nickel and diming. Homeowner, Ames
Have Questions?
The most common causes are a dirty filter or blocked return restricting airflow, a frozen evaporator coil, low refrigerant from a leak, a failed capacitor stopping the compressor while the fan keeps turning, or a condenser coil packed with cottonwood and grass clippings. Start with the filter and hose off the outdoor coil. If it still will not cool, it needs diagnosis — running a system low on refrigerant damages the compressor.
Typical repairs run $180 to $700. A capacitor or contactor is at the low end, a condenser fan motor in the middle, and a refrigerant leak repair with recharge toward the top depending on where the leak is. Compressor replacement is a different conversation — on any system past twelve years we will usually show you the replacement math instead.
Ice forms when the coil gets too cold, which means either not enough warm air moving across it or not enough refrigerant in it. Airflow problems come from a clogged filter, closed registers, a dirty blower wheel or undersized return ducts. The refrigerant side means a leak. Turn the cooling off, run the fan to thaw it, change the filter, and if it refreezes, call us.
Twelve to seventeen years is normal for central air here, with annual maintenance pushing toward the upper end. Systems still running R-22 refrigerant are the exception: that refrigerant is no longer produced, the price of recovered stock makes leak repairs uneconomical, and replacement is almost always the better use of the money.
Yes — a ductless mini-split does exactly that. A small outdoor unit connects to one or more wall-mounted indoor heads through a three-inch wall penetration, with no ducts anywhere. It also provides heat, so a single system handles the room year-round. It is the standard answer for older Ames homes, additions, sunrooms and finished attics.
If both are within a few years of each other in age, usually yes. The indoor coil sits inside the furnace cabinet, so replacing them together costs less than two separate jobs, the blower is properly matched to the coil, and you get one warranty covering the whole system. If the furnace is genuinely much newer, we will quote the AC on its own.
Ames Electric Services offers Smart Energy rebates on qualifying high-efficiency central air and heat pumps for customers inside the city. Accepting the central AC rebate normally requires agreeing to a load-control switch on the outdoor unit. Homes outside Ames are typically served by Alliant Energy under a separate programme. We verify current amounts with the utility and include them in your written quote.
Once a year, in spring before the first hot stretch. Beyond the annual visit, the two things worth doing yourself are changing the filter on schedule and keeping two feet of clear space around the outdoor unit — no shrubs, no stacked firewood and no grass clippings blown into the coil.
Don’t wait for your comfort to freeze over. Get a professional, NATE-certified Converse technician dispatched to your home or business today.
