Any way to get an AC capacitor in town without a license?

A/C wholesalers usually require a license, you may get lucky and one will sell to you.

Post the numbers on the one on your unit and your spare. You may be able to get by with the one you have. Hopefully someone knowledgeable like CrawDude will look at this post.

Coburns sells all a/c parts not in contact with refrigerant to anyone. Try them.

I have a used but functional capacitor - 60/5 MFD. It's yours if the size works on your unit.

ETA e-mail: unobtanium_td@outlook.com

Bought one at Coburns in MS a week ago. Where do you live baw? I have 2.

80+10 MFD is the rating on my capacitor. I found some on Amazon that will deliver Tuesday, just unfortunate it happened over a holiday wknd. I will try coburns if they are open.

Also I tried the manual starting (stick) but no luck with that. Is that a guarantee it’s not the capacitor?

Depending on age, the fan motor itself could be failing.

If you can, pull the fan/shield off and spin the blades. If it turns freely then it's likely the starting capacitor. If it makes any noise while spinning it has a bad bearing.

Another option - find a 10MFD capacitor and hook it up to the fan since the compressor is working OK.

Option of last resort - buy a box fan and ty-rap it over the condenser fan. Plug it into the nearest outlet and that might get you through the weekend.

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Do you have a digital multimeter with a microFarad function on it, as it’s easy to check if capacitor in the unit is bad.

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Nah I checked and my meter only measured ohms amps and ac/dc volts unless I’m misunderstanding it. Not sure what the hFE setting does.

If its just the fan,,put a water hose with a sprayer on it. Turn it towards the fan and let it do the cooling of the coils for you...it works..or at least it did several years ago on an older unit.

Unfortunately your multimeter doesn’t have a capacitance function, if it did this would be this symbol on the meter “All multimeters use the "–|(–” symbol for capacitance.”

So just to be clear you are saying you have 80/10 capacitor in your condensing unit but your spare has a different numbers - correct?

I can’t say for sure that the fan not operating when you give it spin when the HVAC starts indicates with certainty it’s a bad fan but it’s not a good sign. With the system not operating if you can give the fan a hard spin and the blade rotates several revolutions it’s not likely a bad bearing in the fan motor. If fans blades rotates just a 1/4 or 1/2 revolution then stops it’s likely a bad bearing/bushing) in the fan motor and it will need to be replaced (I had to replace mine a couple years ago with this issue). Often when the bearing/bushing in the fan motor begin to fail you hear a loud squealing high pitched sound from the fan motor.

You could try as Unobtanium suggest and place a good sized box fan on top of the grill to pull the heat away from condensor coils when the compressor runs as a temporary fix and see if your HVAC begins to cool, assuming the issue is a bad fan motor, but I’d be cautious with that without HVAC tech entering the thread and suggesting that, only because I’d hate to see you potentially damage your compressor if it doesn’t have protective high pressure/low pressure cutoff switches - not all HVACs do - mine doesn’t.

There’s a place on Florida that sells to the public. I bought there myself

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88-106uf ETA: it’s only got two terminals though. The old one has three

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Sounds like that spare isn’t a dual run capacitor (3 terminals, common, herm, and fan; basically 2 capacitors in a single body) but rather is one that just operates the compressor, meaning you’d need a separate 10 uF capacitor for the fan (as unobtanium mentioned). You could post photos of both the old and spare capacitors, terminals in the photos, and we could likely verify.

Amazing the frequency this stuff fails on weekends, holiday weekends at that.