Repair Crews Busy With Broken Air Conditioners

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Mechanic David Sheehan rolled out a diagnostic cart to work on a car that had no working air conditioning early Wednesday afternoon.

It was his third car with AC problems, and his day wasn't even half over.

"People that let it go through the winter now are starting to show up wanting that cool air in," said Sheehan, an automotive technician at the Goodyear Automotive Service Center on Alleghany Street in west Charlotte.

He said the longer customers wait to fix even the slightest problem with their car's cooling system, the more it could eventually burn a whole in their wallets.

"One charge was in the $1,500 range," he said. "There was quite a lot wrong with it, (and) we had to completely replace the unit. Some other ones have just been some charges (or) very slow leaks over the years."

Channel 9 learned cars were not the only things having problems keeping up with temperatures in the mid-90s. So were home air conditioning units, keeping service technicians like L.T. Baker with Morris-Jenkins Air Conditioning on the run.

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"The first hot day, that's when (the AC units are) the hardest, and that's when they tear up," he said. "I leave the house about 7 o'clock (in the morning) and I get home about 9 or 10 (at night)."

He was one of 90 technicians answering roughly 1,400 calls this week alone -- about double what they normally do, and summer had not begun officially.

"It'll go like this for a couple of weeks, and then it'll kind of back off a little bit," Baker said.

Previous Stories: June 1, 2011: Air Quality Suffers As Temperatures Soar