AC not cooling or stopped in Tampa Bay

Tampa's July normal is a 91 °F high with a 73 °F dew point, and on July 27, 2025 the airport hit 100 °F for the first time in 135 years. A house without cooling in that weather is not a comfort problem; it is 85 °F inside by mid-afternoon and warmer upstairs. This is the call that does not wait, and the reason the line answers around the clock.

Call and get connected with an independent local air-conditioning contractor who serves your part of Hillsborough or Pinellas. Say what the system is doing (running but warm, not starting, tripping the breaker, ice on the copper lines, water on the floor); a call connects you to the contractor directly; the form gets you a call back. Either way, ask them what to switch off until the visit.

Before the contractor arrives

Three things are safe to check yourself. Nothing else is.

• The thermostat: set to Cool, the setpoint below the room temperature, fresh batteries if it has them. A blank screen on a hot day is often a tripped float switch, not a dead system.
• The breaker panel: a split system typically has two breakers, one for the air handler and one for the condenser, sometimes labeled. If one has tripped and you are comfortable at the panel, you can reset it once; if you are not, or if it trips again, leave it off and say so on the call. A breaker that keeps tripping is protecting a motor or a compressor, and the contractor should be the one to find out which.
• Ice on the copper lines or on the indoor coil: switch the system to Off and the fan to On so the ice melts before the technician arrives. Running a frozen system for hours can finish off the compressor.
• Do not open the condenser, top off refrigerant from a kit, or run the system with the filter out. Refrigerant may only be handled by an EPA Section 608-certified technician, and a recharge kit on an A2L or R-410A system creates a mixed charge the contractor then has to recover.

What usually stops a system in this climate

The same few parts fail first around the bay, and most of them are repairs.

• A failed capacitor on the condenser: the fan or the compressor hums and will not start. The most common summer call and one of the quickest fixes.
• A clogged condensate drain line: the float switch shuts the system off to keep water off the floor. Common in closet and garage air handlers from Brandon to Pinellas Park.
• A dirty or iced evaporator coil, or a low refrigerant charge from a slow leak: cold air weakens over days, then the coil freezes. The contractor finds the leak; adding refrigerant every summer is not a repair.
• A failed contactor, a bad blower motor, or a control board taken out by a power surge (the common call after Milton's October 9, 2024 outages).
• A compressor that has failed on an older system, often 12 to 15 years in this climate: the point where repair-or-replace becomes a real question, and the contractor should give you both numbers.

What the contractor does

Ask for diagnosis first: static pressure and airflow, refrigerant pressures and temperatures, electrical checks on the capacitor, contactor, and motors, and a look at the coil and the drain. A repair on the same visit is possible if the technician has the part; if the system is at the end of its life, ask for a written quote that states the refrigerant it uses and the age of the equipment, so the decision is yours.

Condensers in the salt air of the Pinellas beaches and Davis Islands can wear out sooner than inland ones, and a condenser that sat in Helene's surge needs a professional look; AHRI's guidance is to replace flood-damaged equipment rather than repair it (see the replacement page). The contractor should say which case yours is.