Six-Month Warranty on Every Repair, AC Repair, New Westminster
Eaton's Heating repairs central air conditioners across New Westminster, and most of the calls we take start the same way. The AC is running but the house is not cooling, warm air is coming from the vents, the outdoor unit hums but will not start, there is ice on the copper lines, or the breaker keeps tripping. Our $189 diagnostic finds the fault, and every repair is quoted before the work begins. We service every residential brand with OEM, CSA certified parts and six months of warranty on parts and labour. Same-day service available.
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Most air conditioner repair calls come down to a short list of parts. The capacitor is a small cylinder in the outdoor unit that gives the compressor and the fan motor their starting push, and when it weakens the unit hums without starting or starts and quits. The contactor is the switch that sends power to the outdoor unit when the thermostat calls for cooling, and a pitted contactor means the unit runs when it should not or stays silent when it should run. Fan motors wear out, condensate drains clog and shut the system down through a float switch, and a slow refrigerant leak shows up as an AC that cools less each week. The technician tests each of these at the unit, tells you which one it is, and quotes the repair before touching it. Where the fault is a leak, the leak is repaired and the system is tested.
The AC in a New Westminster house is almost always an addition to the furnace, so the indoor coil sits in the basement and the cooled air has to travel up through the ductwork to the bedrooms two floors above. Return grilles in these houses are mostly on the lower floors, which means warm air on the top floor is the last air to be pulled back down and cooled. When a homeowner in The Heights or Glenbrooke North tells us the AC runs all day and the upstairs never gets comfortable, what we find most often is a filter that has not been changed since the heating season, a blower motor or its capacitor losing speed, a coil that has not been cleaned in years, or a charge that has dropped over a few summers. Each of those has its own fix, quoted on the spot, and the top floor cools once it is done.
The houses vary more than the ACs do. Homes in The Heights sit above the street with western exposure and afternoon sun on the upper windows, which is exactly where the cooling is needed. West End and Moody Park have 2000s craftsman rebuilds that came with central air from the start, and their units are reaching the age where capacitors and contactors start to fail. Queensborough and Victoria Hill townhomes have compact units beside the parking or on a back patio. AC repair in all of them is part of our New Westminster HVAC services. Eaton's Heating is TSBC licensed (LGA0200006), a Home Performance Contractor Network member, and holds a 4.9 rating across 400-plus Google reviews.
An air conditioner with a failed capacitor, contactor, fan motor, or drain is a repair at any age, and that includes units running on R-22 refrigerant. The cases where we talk about a new unit are a failed compressor, which is the main working part of the outdoor unit and costs a large share of what a new unit costs, and a refrigerant leak on an R-22 system, because new R-22 has not been produced in Canada since 2020 and the remaining supply costs more each year. If your outdoor unit is from before 2010, the label on the side will tell you whether it is R-22 or R-410A. Either way, the technician quotes the repair first, and if a replacement makes more sense for your house they will say so and point you to AC installation in New Westminster, where the quote for that is written.
Ice on the copper lines at the outdoor unit, or on the indoor coil above the furnace, means the coil surface dropped below freezing and the moisture in the air froze on it instead of draining away. The cause is either too little warm air moving across the coil, from a dirty filter, a blower that is not moving enough air, a coil that needs cleaning, or blocked returns, or a refrigerant charge low enough that the coil runs too cold. Both leave you with an AC that runs for hours and cools less as the ice builds, and both are common in New Westminster homes where the indoor coil sits on a furnace in a basement that also collects the dust from a workshop or a laundry.
If you see ice, turn the cooling off at the thermostat and set the fan to on. The blower will melt the ice over a couple of hours and the water will run down the drain instead of onto the furnace. Leave it that way until the technician arrives, because a frozen coil cannot be tested and running the system with ice on the coil can damage the compressor. When we arrive we check the filter, the coil, the blower, and the charge in that order, and the fix follows from what we find, from a filter change to a leak repair. If the ice came back after the coil was cleaned, the leak is the answer, and we find it rather than adding refrigerant and leaving.
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In most New Westminster houses the indoor coil is in the basement and the returns are downstairs, so the top floor cools last. The repair side of that is a filter, a blower motor or capacitor that has lost speed, a coil that needs cleaning, or a low charge, and each is quoted on the spot after the diagnostic. There is also a free adjustment you can make yourself: in summer, partly close the supply registers in the basement so more of the cooled air is pushed upstairs, and open them again in the fall.
Almost always the capacitor. It stores the charge that starts the fan motor and the compressor, and when it weakens the motor hums without turning. The capacitor is on the truck and the swap takes the technician a few minutes after the diagnostic. If the fan spins freely by hand and the capacitor tests good, the fan motor itself is the next suspect, and those are also a same-visit repair when we have the size on hand.
Yes. Capacitors, contactors, fan motors, and drains are the same repair on an R-22 unit as on a newer one, and an R-22 system that is holding its charge has no reason to be replaced. A leak is the one fault where the refrigerant type matters, because new R-22 is no longer produced in Canada and the supply that remains costs more than it used to. On a leaking R-22 unit the technician will quote the repair and, if you want to compare, a replacement on the newer refrigerant, and let you decide. The refrigerant type is printed on the data plate on the side of the outdoor unit.
The $189 covers the technician's time to test the system and find the fault, and it is charged on every diagnostic visit. The repair is quoted separately and you approve it before any work starts, so you know both numbers up front. If the diagnostic finds a problem that is not the AC, such as a thermostat wiring fault, you are told that before anything is replaced.
Each spring is the right time. A service visit before the first hot week checks the system over and catches the parts that are about to fail, which is a much better day to find a weak capacitor than the first afternoon over 30 degrees. In Sapperton, Queensborough, and any street near the river, the cottonwood fluff in June packs the outdoor coil within a few weeks, and a coil packed with it cannot shed heat. A central air conditioning service in April or May gets ahead of both.
Usually it is a part on its way out rather than a failure, and that is the best time to catch it. A fan motor with worn bearings squeals or grinds at startup, a loose top panel or fan guard rattles when the fan runs, and a compressor that is noticeably louder than it was last summer is worth a diagnostic before a hot week. Debris inside the cabinet is also common and is a quick fix. On Queensborough and Victoria Hill patios the unit sits close to the neighbour's, so a new noise gets noticed fast. The technician finds the source at the unit and quotes the repair before doing it.
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