Air conditioners are very complex electronics, and if something goes wrong with them, people often tend to panic and call HVAC repair services. Fortunately, there is a way to undo the damage that might have been done and restore the unit back to operation. Let us take a closer look.

Common Reasons You May Need To Reset Your Air Conditioning Unit

There are a few times where it makes sense to try and reset your air conditioner in an attempt to restore functionality, before you think about calling in an expert AC service to take a look at the problem and fix it for you. These are:

  1. The thermostat setting is messed up and you cannot seem to get it back in order
  2. You experienced a sudden power outage after which your compressor won’t start
  3. There is an electrical emergency and you need to reset the unit to ensure safety
  4. Your air conditioner is acting up and you are thinking of calling in an AC technician
  5. You are changing houses or planning to sell your AC & want to reset it to factory specs

How To Do It?

Now that you know why it might be useful to know how you can reset your air conditioning unit, it is time to actually learn how to do it, and for that we will need to delve a little deeper into what resetting an appliance actually entails and what are the methods of achieving that. Basically, resetting means restoring the state of any equipment to a prior condition, preferably to the time it arrived from the manufacturer.

There Are Essentially Two Ways Of Achieving This

  1. A software based reset, initiated through the feature built into the AC
  2. A hardware reset where power is cut off and components discharged

Depending on the type of problem you are experiencing with your HVAC unit, you may choose either of the reset options or even both in order, if only a software reset isn’t successful in achieving the desired result and the problem persists. And don’t worry, since a reset is simply restoring the unit to a prior state, you can do it any number of times without having to worry about any negative consequence. And with that, let us get to the main point of this entire blog: how do you actually do it?

The software reset, as explained above, is a feature that comes built into the software, and can be initiated either through the remote, or by pressing a button, or a combination of buttons on the interior of the unit. This will initialize a set of algorithms that is written onto the air conditioners firmware, and once the process is complete, all software settings will be back to factory defaults.

When To Do A Hardware Reset?

If, on the off chance, this fails to remedy the problem you are facing, or the issue stems from a hardware related issue instead of within the software, then it makes sense to do a hardware reset. Many air conditioners come with a reset button on the outer unit, marked prominently in red, pressing which will start the process by disconnecting the unit from the power supply and attempting to discharge all capacitors within the assembly in order to expel any electrical issues that may be preventing the unit from operating optimally.

If in the event that your air conditioner does not have a reset button built in, you may have to initiate the process manually and by this, we mean simply disconnecting the air conditioner from the main power source, unplugging it, cutting off supply at the breaker and then turning the switch on in this state so that the charge stored within the capacitors have a path to flow out of the equipment and into the ground.

After that, simply wait about five to ten minutes to let the components go back to their initial state and then reconnect the power to the unit and turn it back on and hopefully it will be back in perfect working condition. This may work a lot of cases, however there are times where the problem is more serious and calling an air conditioner repair service Port Jefferson might be necessary.