Calling HVAC Experts

Check the outside unit to see if its running. Mine did this and it was capacitor. Although a few years back mine did it and cleaning the coils outside helped as they were pretty dirty.

Mine did this earlier this year and it was the capacitor

Hi, Climate Care Air Conditioning & Heating LLC., Here for ya. There are several factors a correctly licensed HVAC should check when tripping a breaker. When a compressor has an internal short to the case it’s a dead short to ground, could be intermittent, a contactor that arcs or sticks when it’s not supposed to can cause it. Usually a capacitor will kick on the fan in your condenser but your compressor won’t kick on, sometimes you will hear the compressor making a groaning noise or buzzing sound. The wiring plug that plugs into the compressor can burn or short at that location causing a trip relay. It’s going to be at the condenser just about always, very rarely but it does occur that your disconnect can be bad, I’ve seen lightning do this before, opened up the disconnect and it was burnt but was still trying to pass enough power to try and kick the condenser on only to trip the breaker. Hope that helps

Mine did the same this year. The code on the thermostat showed low refrigerant, but it turned out to be a capacitor. I didn't even go look at it and trusted the code. Called a guy we know, he came out and looked at the outside unit and sure enough the capacitor was all swoll up.

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Capacitor board

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This. I’m not a licensed tech but generally when a capacitor is bad it’s bad, you can’t reset it. Often times they blow up basically.

I’ve had the board on the outside unit go bad and the exact thing happened OP. We could reset it with the breaker and it would work again. So my guess is that’s the issue here OP.

The problem is you need to call someone out to check it out when it has gone bad, which requires no AC until they arrive.