Evaporator Coil Repair, the Off Duty Way.
The evaporator coil lives hidden in your air handler doing the actual cooling, and when it leaks, the whole system quietly bleeds capacity, money, and refrigerant. Coil problems are where a shop’s honesty gets tested, because the repair-versus-replace call is genuinely close on many systems, and the customer can rarely see the evidence. So we show it.
Air Conditioning · Burnet & Central Texas
The Hidden Half of Your Cooling
Everyone knows the outdoor unit; the evaporator coil is its hidden partner, a cold aluminum-and-copper heart inside the air handler where refrigerant absorbs the house’s heat. Texas coils lead hard lives: constant condensation in our humidity, formicary corrosion that eats copper from the inside out, attic heat cycling, and the occasional manufacturing weakness that surfaces years later. When a coil springs leaks, symptoms creep rather than crash, cooling weakens gradually, ice appears, the system needs mysterious yearly top-offs, and each pound of leaked refrigerant is money literally vanishing into the air.
Finding coil leaks takes instruments and patience: electronic detection at the coil surfaces, dye where appropriate, nitrogen pressure testing for confirmation, and UV inspection on the tricky ones. Formicary leaks especially, pinholes from corrosion, hide from lazy searches. Once found, the honest fork opens. Accessible single-point leaks on otherwise healthy coils can sometimes be properly brazed, a real repair with real limits we explain plainly. Coils with formicary corrosion are typically leaking in many microscopic places at once, and patching one hole in a colander is theater we decline to sell.
The replace conversation, when it comes, gets the full daylight treatment: coil replacement versus system replacement, warranty status checked from the serial number, refrigerant compatibility explained, and the numbers side by side. Coils on registered newer equipment are frequently covered parts, and we file those claims as a matter of course.
Local conditions shape this work more than most homeowners expect. Our summers stack week after week of hundred-degree afternoons, which means long compressor runtimes, drain lines moving gallons of condensate a day, and electrical components living near their limits from June through September. Lake humidity keeps the corrosion clock running even in mild months, and spring pollen packs filters fast enough to choke airflow in weeks. A tech who works this exact hundred miles every day builds all of that into the evaporator coil repair call: what to check first, which parts fail early here, and which settings survive a Texas cooling season instead of merely a laboratory one.
Air Conditioning
Signs the Coil Is Bleeding
Evaporator leaks announce themselves sideways. These are the usual tells, and none of them get better on their own.
Skip the reading, make the call.
Two minutes on the phone with a real tech beats an hour of internet research. Describe the symptom in your own words and get a straight answer about cause, timing, and cost.
Why Off Duty
Repair Honesty in a Gray-Area Trade
Coil verdicts are where customers get steered, in both bad directions. Some shops patch unpatchable formicary coils, collecting for repairs that fail by August. Others condemn every leaky coil toward a replacement commission. The honest middle requires showing work: here is where the leak is, here is why this one is brazeable or why this coil is a colander, here is the warranty status from your serial number, here are both prices with their five-year outlooks. Our techs earn nothing from steering, and the evidence gets photographed for your file, so the decision rests on what is actually inside your air handler rather than on whose truck is in the driveway.
One systemic honesty note: a replaced coil must match the outdoor unit and its refrigerant, and mismatched marriages, new coil, incompatible metering, wrong refrigerant assumptions, are a quiet epidemic in cut-rate work. Our coil replacements are matched, metered, pressure-tested, evacuated to verified vacuum, and charged by weight, the unglamorous sequence that decides whether the fix lasts fifteen years or fifteen months.
Every evaporator coil repair call runs the same four steps we run on everything. You call (512) 925-3090 and a real person answers, any hour of any day. We diagnose with gauges and meters, never with guesses, until the actual cause is proven. Then we explain it straight: the failure, the fix, and the exact price, in plain English, before any work starts. Finally we do the work to spec and verify it under load before the truck leaves. Temperatures checked, pressures checked, paperwork handled. It is the same process that earned the reviews on our reviews page, and it does not change based on the size of the job.
A straight word on money. We do not print teaser prices on this website and we do not do surprise math on invoices. Call, describe the problem, and we will tell you what the visit costs before a truck rolls. When the diagnosis is in, you get the full repair price out loud, before the work starts, and you decide with the real number in front of you.
Worth saying plainly: this is not a problem that ages well. Systems compensate quietly right up until they cannot, and the failure that finally announces itself usually costs more than the one caught early would have. If your gut says something is off, that instinct is worth one free phone call. The worst case is we tell you everything sounds normal, which is a pretty good worst case.
As for who shows up: this is an owner-operated shop, so the tech at your door is usually Bryce himself, a second-generation HVAC man with ten years on the tools, licensed, insured, and photographed doing exactly this kind of work in the job gallery. No commissioned salesman rides along, and nobody at this company earns a bonus for talking you into more than you need.
Coverage is the same as everything else we do: Burnet at the center, about 100 miles in every direction. That means the lake towns, Marble Falls, Kingsland, Horseshoe Bay, the corridor through Leander, Cedar Park, and Georgetown, plus Austin, Bell County, and the outer ring through Waco, San Marcos, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg, and Boerne. The full sixteen-county list lives on the service areas page, and if you sit just past the edge of it, call anyway and get an honest answer.
Diamond Contractor
Mitsubishi’s top ductless credential, earned with factory training.
Second Generation
Raised in the trade, ten years on the tools before the name went on a truck.
Warranty Authorized
JB and Mitsubishi warranty work: we file the claim, you skip the fight.
Open 24 Hours
A real person answers the phone at any hour, every day of the year.
The Standard
How This Work Gets Done Here
Every trade job carries an invisible line item: the standard it was done to. On evaporator coil repair work, ours reads like this. The diagnosis is proven with instruments, because guessing is expensive and it is your money on the table. The parts that go in are parts we would put in our own house, matched to spec instead of whatever was cheapest on the shelf. The workmanship follows the manufacturer’s book and the Texas code book both, because shortcuts hide for exactly one season and then bill you with interest.
When the work is finished, it gets tested the way it will actually be used: under load, at temperature, with the readings written down. Then the area gets left the way we found it or cleaner, the old parts get shown to you on request, and the invoice matches the number you already heard. If anything acts up afterward, you call the same number and the same person answers. That is the entire warranty conversation most customers ever need, and it is why the reviews keep saying the same three things: honest, fair, showed up.
Evaporator Coil Repair Questions
Asked Before We Roll a Truck
The ones the phone line hears most for this service, with the answers given at full length instead of sales-brochure length.
Why does my AC need refrigerant every single summer?
Because it is leaking, full stop. Refrigerant is not fuel; a sealed system never consumes it, so an annual top-off means an annual escape, and the evaporator coil is one of the most common escape points in Texas systems thanks to formicary corrosion. Each top-off buys temporary cooling while the real problem compounds, and the refrigerant money spent yearly would fund actual diagnosis quickly. The honest sequence: find the leak with instruments, then decide repair versus replacement with evidence. Renting refrigerant by the season is the most expensive plan available.
What is formicary corrosion, and is it really unfixable?
It is copper corrosion driven by moisture and common airborne compounds, household chemistry among them, that tunnels microscopic ant-farm passages through coil tubing until pinholes weep refrigerant. The insidious part: it rarely makes one hole. A coil leaking from formicary corrosion is typically failing in many places at various stages, which is why brazing one detected pinhole so often disappoints by season’s end. That is not unfixable pessimism; it is materials reality, and it is why our verdict for confirmed formicary coils is usually replacement, with the evidence shown rather than asserted.
Is my evaporator coil covered under warranty?
A genuinely useful question, because coils are among the most commonly covered failures. Registered equipment from the major manufacturers typically carries ten-year parts coverage, and coils, with their known corrosion vulnerabilities, are frequent warranty subjects. The serial number tells the story, and we run that check as a standard part of coil diagnosis, then file the claim and handle the paperwork as an authorized servicer. Covered parts still leave labor and materials, quoted plainly, but the difference between a covered and uncovered coil replacement is substantial, and worth five minutes of verification every time.
Can I just keep topping off instead of fixing it?
You can, the way you can keep filling a leaking tire. The costs stack quietly: refrigerant itself, repeatedly; the efficiency penalty of running chronically low between top-offs; ice events that strain the compressor; and on older R-22 systems, top-off refrigerant priced like a collectible. Meanwhile the leak grows on its own schedule, choosing its failure date without consulting yours, typically mid-heat-wave. The arithmetic almost always favors diagnosis now: one instrumented leak search converts an open-ended subscription into a known, one-time decision with real numbers attached.
How long does coil replacement take, and what does it involve?
Typically most of a day done properly. The sequence: refrigerant recovered legally, old coil extracted from the air handler or plenum, new matched coil set with correct metering device, connections brazed under nitrogen, the system pressure-tested, evacuated to a verified deep vacuum, and recharged by weight to specification, then performance-verified with temperature split and pressures documented. The verification steps are where cut-rate jobs economize and where longevity is actually determined. You get the readings in your file and a system that should not revisit this page for a very long time.
Related work: Refrigerant Leak Repair · Frozen Evaporator Coil Repair · AC Repair · see real jobs in the gallery
Stop Renting Refrigerant
Instrumented leak diagnosis, honest verdicts with photos, and warranty checks run as standard. Prefer to write it out? Send the form and we call you back.
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