Water leaking outside of house.

New home owner here. Ive had this house for about 8 months now and this is as hot as its ever been it seems. I noticed I have a piece of PVC pipe running to the outside of the house hanging down from just under the overhang of hte roof. This looks to be some drain off for the a/c unit. Im getting a good amount of water dripping anytime the a/c unit is turned on. Is this normal? I did see that both my attic fans are froze up as well. Thanks for any info!!

 

yes normal for it to drip, not so normal for the installer to leave the PVC condenstae drain line up high and just let the water drip down the side of house, I would probably call that lazy LOL

 

Well its dripping a lot.. wasnt sure if that was normal. Its not dripping on the house at all.. just right beside it on the ground. I will post a link to a picture when I get my camera back so that I can see if this much is normal.. thanks for the reply!

 

Um...it may not be normal. All evaporator units have two drains. A main drain and an overflow drain.

The main drain may be piped into a sewer pipe of your house and under normal conditions you never see the condensate from your A/C anywhere. It may very well be piped to the outside and what you see is normal, but as stated, a shoddy install.

The overflow is normally piped to a location that is selected to get your attention and alert you to a malfunctioning main drain. In the old days it was over a sink or bathtub. More recently of course, over a walkway outside the house.

What you may see is your overflow alerting you to a stopped up main drain. You need to follow the pipe back to your air handler/evap coil and determine which it is. If it is the main drain then it is normal. If the overflow then you have a main drain problem. It needs attention before you sustain ceiling damage.

 

In hot humid weather a unit will produce a large amount of water some larger units will run out a solid stream about the size of a pencil. The water comes from humidty in the air condensating on the fins of the evaporator coils, same principal as setting a glass of ice tea on the table, the outside of the glass is cooled below the dew point of the air around it and the humidty in the air will condensate and run down the glass and puddle, only difference is that the unit has a very large area/large quantity of air forced across it and simply produces a bunch more water. The attic exhaust fans being out are probably having some effect upon the units quantity of condensate water produced since it probably has to run longer to overcome the added heat load from a poorly ventilated attic, but the air flowing over the coil is (should be unless duct is loose or something) coming from inside your house, not the attic space, so humidty levels in the attic space have little to no effect on water produced.

 

Im glad a got a 13 month home warranty incase I have an issue. Im installing the attic fans this weekend (ex. electrician here). What is a good temp to have these things come on? Ive been told 110F. I will get my camera back this weekend and take some pics of the unit and water so hopefully I can get an idea if I am looking at some A/C trouble or not. Thanks again for the repys!!!

 

is it a wall unit?

 

no, I think its a 4 ton YORK.

 

Followed the pipe up in the attic. There is a pan the pipe leads up to and that pan is full of water about an inch high. This normal? Im in the process of replacing the attic fans and those fans are a pain to get off the motor.

 

What you probably saw was the overflow pan. Was it underneath the unit? If so, look on the unit itself for another pipe and see where it goes. It is probably piped into a sewer pipe somewhere, and if so it is stopped up.

 

So how do I fix the clog?

 

Is that what you found? Depends on what type of pipe it is. You basically remove it and either blow through it, or preferrable suck it out with a shop vac.

 

After you unclog the main drain, (the drain that you see is the aux drain outside) I would have a pan switch installed. What that will do is if the main gets clogged again it will shut the unit down so you know it has a problem with the main drain.

 

I was told that there is a drain blowout kit made for the problem im having. Will that work? Anyone have any experience with them? One of my buddies said he used draino on his..

 

The only one I know of is sold in supply houses.

I do not think i would use drain-O in it.

 

I would never use a drain blow out kit or draino. The draino is damaging to parts of the unit. Even though you are not intending to get it on those parts the very nature of an A/C is to circulate air, and the corrosive properties of the draino is in the air. The blow out kit... would work fine as long as you use it to blow the clog out the end of an open line. I would never blow the clog further down into your sewer system of the house...

 

Does the pipe have fitting that can be removed and put right back on? Im not much of a plumber but have done some sink repair. I do own a small shop vac that has some pretty good suction on it.

 

It turned out to be the coil in the attic had a hole in it that was dripping water into the pan. Friend I work with has a brother who does a/c and does it commercially as well as residientail. He is picking me up a high effeciency coil so when I replace my unit outside to something more up to date ill be good to go with that also.

 

That would make perfect sense if you had a chilled water system. But you don't. If you had a hole in your coil then you would be leaking freon, not water. As the freon leaked out it would cause the coils to freeze up eventually, and then eventually melt causing a lot of water, but it would stop once it all melted. You would have been complaining of how hot it was and not how much condensate there was. Could he have meant a coil drip pan perhaps?

But, we are not there so the best we can say is good luck and let us know how it all works out.

 

It was the coil.. the the actual coil its self but hte casing that holds it had the leak.... this leak dripped into hte catch pan which had a line feeding out to the front of hte house so I noticed the leak. I have a new coil now and spent some time using Iron grip on everything so its sealed up nice and tight. A/C seems to be working better then ever but wont know for sure untill we get some more hot weather.

 

[QUOTE=Copyright] What is a good temp to have these things come on? Ive been told 110F[QUOTE]

I just bought a fan and the direction say to leave it near the 135 deg pre set then adjust, I raised mine to 145 here in South Florida, if you lower it to 110 it will probably run constantly