aw, crap

Got home and thought, "Gee, my house feels kind of warm." and then, "Gee, the a/c fan sounds funny."

A little inspection revealed a small amount of ice on one of the "inside" copper pipes (I have a terribly jerry-rigged system: I live in an old, old house (used to have a floor furnace and NO a/c) and about 10 years ago, the person living in it at the time had a furnace/fan unit installed in a hall closet and an outdoor air conditioning unit installed and hooked up to the whole mess. And yes, I live in fear of the day I'll have to replace it all, because a lot of the works is in the crawl space under the house).

There was more ice on part of the tubing of the outside unit.

A quick scan of the homeowner DIY websites (really, I am NOT handy - I have to find a reference most times something goes south) reveals that ice means one of two things:

1. It's a shortlived glitch related to high humidity; turn the unit off and once the ice melts everything should be copacetic. (But set the thermostat to a higher temp. in the future)

2. The system needs more coolant, which, depending on what website you read, means running the system when it's low either:
a. your house will not get as cool as you would like but it's ok until you can get people out

or

b. Danger, Will Robinson! Turn the sucker back on and you will DESTROY your unit.

Gah. I hate choices like that. If it's #1, the ice should melt in perhaps another 15 minutes, and I'll be good to go. If it's #2 a., nothing bad will happen if I try to put the thing back on. But if it's 2 b., I could be facing thousands of dollars worth of problems.

(And yes, I have been changing the filters regularly. So it is not merely a dirty filter. In fact, I changed the filter Saturday.)

It's 78* in my house right now. Not as cool as I like it, ideally, especially for trying to sleep, but it's also a damn sight better than my office at work (which was 86* today - no fooling - and complaints to the Physical Plant go unanswered.) So I don't know. I may wander out and look at the pipeworks again to see if the ice is melting.

This problem JUST cropped up, I assume, sometime in the past 12 or so hours - the a/c was perfectly fine when I left the house; in fact, it's been fine all spring so far. I find it hard to believe that a leak could take it from "fine and dandy and cooling very nicely" at 7 am to "pooped out and iced up" at 7 pm, considering that I didn't hit the unit with my car or anything leaving for work today, and there's no signs of anyone trying to steal the copper from it, or anything like that.

I hate this kind of choice, though - do I spend a semi-uncomfortable night and hope the a/c guys can come out tomorrow afternoon (it's the first hot week here so I'm willing to bet they'll be overbooked - and they are the ONLY good HVAC people in town, trust me, I've tried), or do I gamble with my a/c unit?

I'm already feeling a bit bad because I had to e-mail a research student and tell him I'd not be able to help him set up some fieldwork tomorrow (well, it IS something he could do on his own - he's smart enough by far, but I hate crapping out on people like that.)