re: Reminder - get your spare A/C capacitor if you do not have one.

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What is causing capacitors to go out? I’ve been owning houses 41 years now and I’ve never had a capacitor go out. Current house ,we built in 2020 and had to have unit replaced after 14 years because it wasn’t cooling but otherwise I’ve never had unit quit working except power outages.

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Cheaply made Chinese capacitors being placed in HVAC units by the manufacturers. Are better capacitors available, of course there are, and they’d cost the manufacturer about $20 per unit to install good ones, but they don’t.

Heat and voltage spikes are the 2 main causes of HVAC capacitor failure. You can’t control the heat in southern LA but one can place a surge protector on the HVAC condensing unit at the disconnect to protect the capacitor and circuit boards from voltage spikes.

I’ve never had a capacitor failure on any HVAC condensing unit I’ve owned either, but the capacitors that came with my units were never made in China but rather either the USA or Mexico. That said, I swapped my original Mexican manufactured capacitor on my 17 year old condensing unit a few years ago with an American made AmRad capacitor (5 year manufacturers warranty) and kept the original capacitor that came with the unit as a spare.

Capacitor failure and replacement is the number 1 service call by HVAC techs in cooling season, so I read on professional HVAC forums.