Monsoon season takes the power out, it comes back, and the air conditioner sits there doing nothing. Most of the time this is fixable in about ten minutes — but the order matters, and so does the waiting.
If the power just came back, give it thirty minutes before deciding anything is broken. Many systems have a built-in delay that stops the compressor restarting immediately, because starting against high refrigerant pressure is what damages compressors. That delay is protecting your most expensive part.
Some thermostats show this as a wait or delay message. If yours does, that's the system working correctly, not failing.
Turn the thermostat to OFF first. Not to a different temperature — fully off. This stops the system trying to start while you're cutting power to it.
Next, switch off the breaker for the indoor air handler and the breaker for the outdoor unit. They're often separate. Leave both off for about five minutes so the control boards fully lose power and reset rather than coming back up in whatever confused state the outage left them in.
Then turn the breakers back on — outdoor first, then indoor — and leave the thermostat off for another five minutes. Finally set the thermostat back to COOL and your normal temperature. Give it a few minutes to start.
There's usually a pull-out disconnect box on the wall near the outdoor unit. A surge can trip its fuses even when the breaker looks fine, and a system with a blown disconnect fuse behaves exactly like one that's dead.
If the box has visible damage, scorching or a burnt smell, stop there and call somebody. That's a sign the surge did real electrical damage, and switching it back on is not the right next move.
If the reset doesn't bring it back, the outage probably damaged something. The most common casualties are the capacitor, the contactor, and the control board — all repairs rather than replacements, and all things we see regularly after a monsoon storm.
A system that hums without starting, trips the breaker immediately, or starts and then drops out within seconds is telling you the same thing. Those are worth calling about rather than resetting repeatedly, because repeated start attempts against a fault do add damage.
Surges are also why a whole-home or HVAC-specific surge protector is worth asking about here. Monsoon season is hard on electronics, and a control board is an expensive thing to lose to a storm.
Storm damage to a capacitor, contactor or board is common and usually a repair, not a replacement. We're open 24 hours.
