Air conditioning broken down?
Start here. There are five things worth checking before anybody comes out, and two of them you can do yourself in the next ten minutes.
First, the bit most of these pages bury
We are not a 24-hour call-out service, and we would rather tell you that now than take a booking we cannot keep.
Krown Kooling is Kevin and a small team. He is out fitting and repairing during the day, so there is nobody sitting behind a phone at three in the morning. The hours are Monday to Saturday, 10am to 6pm. Inside them, we ring you back within two hours and tell you honestly when we can get to you. Outside them, first thing the next working day.
If your machine has failed and you genuinely cannot wait until morning, a 24-hour firm is the right call and we will not be offended. What we can promise is that when we do say a time, it is a real one.
What to do right now
In the order that matters. The first two prevent damage; the last two occasionally fix the problem outright and cost you nothing.
- If it is tripping the electrics, leave it off
- Switch it off at the isolator or the wall and stop resetting the breaker. A circuit that keeps tripping is telling you something, and repeatedly forcing it back on is how a fault that was going to be a repair becomes a fault that is not.
- If there is a burning smell, off at the wall
- Not the remote — the isolator or the socket. Then ring us. This is the one symptom on this page where we would rather you did not wait to see whether it settles down.
- If it is leaking water, put something under it and switch it off
- Usually a blocked condensate drain rather than anything dangerous, but the water has to go somewhere and a ceiling is an expensive place for it to go. A bowl and the off switch buys you the time to get us out.
- If it has just stopped cooling, check the filter first
- Genuinely. Slide the front off the indoor unit and look. If it is furred with dust, that alone can stop a machine cooling, and it is the one thing on this list you can fix yourself in ten minutes without a single tool.
- If the outdoor box is packed in with leaves, clear round it
- It gets rid of the heat the indoor unit has just collected, and it cannot do that buried in a hedge or under a year of leaf fall. Give it a foot of clear air on every side and see whether that changes anything.
Why everything breaks in the same fortnight
Air conditioning fails in the first proper hot spell of the year, and it does it to everybody at once. A machine that has been quietly struggling all through a mild spring is fine right up until the day it is asked to work hard.
Which is why the honest answer about how fast anyone can get to you in late June is longer than the honest answer in April. Every firm in the Midlands is in the same week.
The way to never read this page again
A serviced machine is the one that does not fail in that fortnight. Almost everything on this page starts as something small and cheap that somebody could have caught in the spring — a filter, a drain, a slow leak.
Tell us what it is doing and we will ring you back
We’ll ring you back within two hours.Mon to Sat, 10am to 6pm. Outside those hours, first thing the next working day.