Trees are a mixed blessing for an air conditioner
Shade over a roof and west facing walls genuinely lowers your cooling load, and a mature canopy is worth having. The cost shows up outside at the condenser. Pine needles, seed pods and leaf litter pack into the coil fins and settle inside the top of the cabinet, and a coil that cannot reject heat runs high head pressure and works the compressor harder than it should.
Overgrown landscaping does the same thing more slowly. Shrubs planted close for looks grow into the unit and choke off airflow on one side. Keep the sides clear and keep the top open, and rinse the coil gently with a garden hose with the power off. A pressure washer will fold the fins flat and make the problem permanent.
Two generations of houses, two kinds of call
In the older Spring homes, the equipment has often been replaced once or twice while the duct system has never been touched. That is the single most common thing we find. New efficient equipment attached to undersized returns and forty year old duct with degraded insulation cannot deliver what it was rated to deliver, and the homeowner reasonably concludes the new system was a lemon.
In the newer homes further north the equipment is usually the story, and it is the familiar two story attic air handler situation: long duct runs, hot attic, warm upstairs bedrooms.
Storms, breakers and control boards
This area gets its share of hard thunderstorms, and the calls that follow are predictable: a tripped breaker, a blown fuse in the outdoor disconnect, or a surge damaged control board. A breaker that trips once during a storm can be reset. A breaker that trips again immediately is telling you something is wrong on that circuit.
Do not keep resetting it. Repeated resets on a genuine fault is how a bad contactor becomes a burnt wire. Turn the system off at the thermostat, leave the breaker off, and call us at (713) 929-9595. We answer around the clock.