How R2-D2 Kept Us Cool on The Worst Weekend For The Air Conditioning to Go Out

When is the best time for your HVAC system to go out?

Well, it certainly isn’t over a holiday weekend. That’s the perfect storm going on in our household for the Fourth of July weekend. Our 19-year-old heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning unit finally succumbed to the Texas heat.

In the meantime, we’re surviving in just a few rooms with a portable A/C unit that looks like R2-D2, the Star Wars droid. It certainly came to our rescue.

Let’s rewind to how we got here: It’s Thursday afternoon in the home office, and I begin to smell ozone or plastic melting. We check the obvious places, but it persists. Then it seems to be getting warmer. We check the thermostat. It’s several degrees warmer than its preset level, a bad sign. My wife, Brigitte, the daughter of a builder, checks the attic where the HVAC lives. It all seems fine. Then, it gets warmer. She manually resets the circuit breaker. Still heating up.

We call our usual A/C guy. He answers curtly. He’s busy and can’t get to it. Business is so brisk that he can’t erase his phone’s SOS voicemails fast enough. We ask a longtime friend about the A/C guy, and she recommended another who had just replaced her 18-year-old system. And the New A/C Guy lives nearby.

New A/C Guy also was busy, but since it was a referral … well, apparently those mean something in the HVAC game.

New A/C Guy comes over, checks out the damage, and stopped short of telling us we need a new system. He went into HVAC-speak that was over my head: the coil or condenser had had enough, prompting the unit to freeze up and create condensation, which dripped onto the circuit board and caused a short, which was the burnt plastic smell.

New AC Guy said he could replace the parts, but it would require Freon, and, well, good luck with that. We could replace it with a 14-SEER or above unit, which is more juiced than the relic sitting in the attic.

OK, maybe it’s time for a bright, shiny new unit. We expected its demise. New A/C Guy quotes us about $8,300 for a new unit. Now sweating and with few options, we give him a clammy thumbs up. However … he can’t do any install until Tuesday. TUESDAY!

We gasped. Well, if that’s the best he can do, that’s the best he can do.

Then he asked softly, with genuine concern: “What are y’all going to do? Where are you going to stay? Until Tuesday?”

We just said we’d figure something out.

As it turned out, as the house heated up, so, too, did my desperation. I checked local hotels — $80 per night through Tuesday. Maybe a window unit? The HOA wouldn’t like that, but I didn’t care at that point.

So, I went to the home improvement store that rhymes with crows. I spotted the answer: An upright portable AC unit that rolls around on casters and has a hose that draws outside air. It has a cooling power of 5800 British thermal units, whatever that means. I just know that it’s cheaper than five days in a hotel.

My wife put it together, saying a few choice words about typos in the directions, and we were in business. This little R2-D2 can cool for 250 square feet, about the space of the home office in our 2,366-square-foot suburban home. I started wondering: To recoup costs, should I sell this portable A/C once the HVAC is installed?

Maybe. Naw. Who would sell R2-D2? Instead of Obi-Wan, this R2-D2 was our only hope.