A Repair Tech on the Three-Dollar Part That Took Ten Days to Arrive

This is the sixth in a series of imagined interviews with people who occupy key positions in the chain between a climate event and a household's experience of it. Previous installments have explored the perspectives of a landlord, a 311 dispatcher, a code inspector, and a parts distributor. The interviewee below is fictional, a composite built from documented field conditions, named sources in trade press, and published operational data from the 2026 summer season. Any resemblance to an actual person named Colt Swelter is, regrettably, a coincidence the universe should answer for.

We meet Colt Swelter in a Buc-ee's parking lot off I-10 East at 2:47 p.m. on a Wednesday in late July. He is sitting in his service van with the engine running and the AC on full, eating a chopped brisket sandwich and checking his dispatch tablet. Four calls completed since 7 a.m. Nine more queued. His shirt is soaked through in a pattern that suggests rooftop condensers. He is 12 years into residential HVAC service in Houston and holds both EPA Section 608 Universal certification and the newer A2L refrigerant handling credential. He agreed to this conversation on the condition that we not make him sound like "one of those guys on TikTok who tells you your whole system is trash so he can sell you a new one."

How many calls are you running today?

Colt: Thirteen scheduled. I'll finish maybe ten. Normal day in April, I do five or six and I'm home by four. Right now the whole company is running probably 120, 130 a day. Normal summer is maybe 40.¹ You do the math on how long people are waiting.

How long are they waiting?

Colt: Maintenance contract with us, maybe two days. New call, no contract, residential — which is most renters — five to seven days right now to get a tech out. I've shown up to places where they called ten days ago.² And look, I know what that sounds like. But there are only so many of us. Guys are retiring faster than new techs come up. BLS says about 40,000 openings a year in this trade nationally.³ We are not keeping up.

What do you see when you walk into one of those ten-day calls?

Colt: (Sets sandwich down.) You see the fans first. Every fan in the house is running. Box fans, oscillating fans, the little personal ones from Walmart. Towels in the freezer. Sometimes they've got a cooler full of ice sitting in front of a fan, which does something. Barely. The windows are open, which in Houston in July means you're letting in air that's 98 degrees and 70 percent humidity, so now everything is damp and hot.

And then you see the person.

I had a call last week, older couple, the husband has a pacemaker. They'd been sleeping in their car at night for the AC. In the car. She told me they'd drive to the H-E-B parking lot and just sit there with the engine running until two, three in the morning, then come back inside. Six days of that.

I fixed their unit in forty minutes. It was a capacitor. Three-dollar part.⁴

A three-dollar part.

But here's the other side. Sometimes I open the panel and the compressor is seized. Gone. And now we're talking about a part that, this summer? Three to four weeks to get.⁷

Why three to four weeks?

Colt: (Laughs, but not happily.) Okay, so. The EPA phased down R-410A — that's the refrigerant most systems installed since about 2010 use. New systems now run R-454B, which is an A2L refrigerant, mildly flammable, different safety requirements, different components, different everything.⁸ Fine. Good for the planet. I'm not arguing with that. But the factories had to retool. They stopped making repair parts for existing R-410A systems so they could push out the new equipment.⁹ So the part I need for your ten-year-old system that was working fine until Tuesday? Used to come overnight. Now it's three, four weeks. Some customers are just buying whole new systems because they can't wait a month in a Houston summer.¹⁰

And the new systems can't just drop into the old setup. A2L requires spark-proof contactors, leak detection sensors, redesigned electricals.¹¹ So if your building is from 1978, we might be looking at an electrical upgrade before the new unit even goes in. Which is its own timeline.

Speaking of electrical — tell me about the landlord who buys a window unit to solve the problem.

Colt: Oh, this is my favorite. (He says "favorite" the way a periodontist says "interesting.") Landlord goes to Home Depot, buys a 12,000 BTU window unit. Shows up, plugs it in, calls it done. I get dispatched because the tenant says it's tripping the breaker.

I look at the panel. The bedroom is on a 15-amp circuit shared with the bathroom, the hallway, and the refrigerator. I am not making this up. That window unit pulls 10, 11 amps on startup.¹² The circuit can't carry it. The breaker does exactly what it's supposed to do: it trips. So now the landlord has "provided cooling" — there's a unit in the window — but the building literally cannot run it without an electrician coming out to add a dedicated circuit. Separate trade, separate call, separate wait.¹³

Houston's proposed cooling ordinance would require equipment "capable of maintaining" either 20 degrees below outdoor temperature or 80°F, whichever is warmer. At 109 outside, that's 89 inside. What does that number mean to you?

Colt: It means I can install a unit that meets the law and leave a room that I wouldn't put my dog in.

Can you say more?

Colt: A 10,000 BTU window unit in a thousand-square-foot apartment in Houston — technically it's "equipment capable of cooling." But in this climate you need 24,000 to 28,000 BTU per thousand square feet to actually hold temperature.¹⁴ That little unit will run 24 hours a day and never get below 87, 88 degrees. And if it's a portable unit? Those deliver about 30 percent less cooling than the label says because of how the single-hose design works.¹⁵ Your 14,000 BTU portable is really a 10,000 BTU unit pretending.

The ordinance says "capable of maintaining." Capable according to what? The sticker on the box? Or the thermometer in the room? Because those are very different answers, and I promise you the thermometer doesn't care what the ordinance says.

You mentioned the couple with the pacemaker. When you fixed their capacitor in forty minutes, what was the conversation like?

Colt: She cried. He kept saying thank you. And I'm standing there holding a part that costs less than my sandwich, thinking — this wasn't a hard problem. This was a scheduling problem. There just aren't enough of us, and the people who wait the longest are the ones with no maintenance contract, no leverage, no backup plan. The ones who need us fastest are at the back of the line.

I don't know how to fix that. That's above my pay grade. I fix capacitors.

What do you wish people understood about what you do?

Is there anything you'd want a tenant to know before they call?

Colt: Check your breaker. Check your thermostat batteries. Go outside and look at your condenser — if it's buried in leaves or the fan isn't spinning, that's information that helps me when I get there. And if your AC is running but the house won't go below 85, that might not be broken. That might be your system doing everything it can.¹⁶ Which is a different kind of problem, and not one I can fix with a wrench.

Colt finishes his sandwich, checks the tablet — next call is in Alief, a 22-minute drive — and pulls out of the parking lot. His van carries approximately 200 common parts. The capacitor that would have saved the couple with the pacemaker six nights in a parking lot is one of them. It has been on the van the whole time.

Footnotes

1. Vredevoogd Heating & Cooling in Michigan reported going from 10–15 daily service calls to 100–150 during the July 2026 heat wave. WLNS, July 10, 2026 ↩

2. Texas Property Code § 92.052 defines a "reasonable time" for AC repair as approximately 7 days; Lone Star Legal Aid attorney Jonna Treble says the practical window is 7–10 days. Click2Houston, July 30, 2026 ↩

3. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbook: HVAC Mechanics and Installers. 425,200 jobs in 2024, ~40,100 projected annual openings 2024–2034. ↩

4. Capacitors and contactors account for the majority of summer breakdown calls. MrTask, 2025 ↩

5. Approximately 40% of emergency HVAC calls stem from thermostat malfunctions or tripped breakers. Blue Bear Plumbing/HVAC, June 3, 2026 ↩

6. AC units produce 8–12 gallons of condensation per day in humid climates. WSAV News ↩

7. Patrick Garner, operations manager for Cardinal Plumbing Heating and Air (Northern Virginia), reported parts that once arrived overnight now average 3–4 weeks. WTOP News, June 6, 2026 ↩

8. New residential AC systems manufactured from January 2025 onward use R-454B or other A2L refrigerants. Grasshopper HVAC, June 3, 2026 ↩

9. Garner: "All the factories stopped making repair parts because they had to push out replacement equipment for new refrigerant." WTOP News, June 6, 2026 ↩

10. Some customers "literally just buying a new system and just biting the bullet because they don't want to wait a month and a half during the summer." WTOP News, June 6, 2026 ↩

11. A2L systems require spark-proof contactors, integrated leak detection sensors, and redesigned electrical components. HVAC PRO Sales ↩

12. Window AC units range from 5–30 amps; units drawing 10–12 amps may require a 20-amp dedicated circuit. Pick Comfort; Premier Cooling and Heating ↩

13. Fuse boxes and older electrical systems may not safely support new AC units without panel upgrades. Strickland HVAC, July 25, 2025 ↩

14. Hot climates like Texas may require 24,000–28,000 BTU per 1,000 square feet. BTU Calculator / hvacloadcalculate.com ↩

15. Portable AC units deliver approximately 30% less effective cooling than rated BTUs due to single-hose design inefficiencies. BTU Calculator / hvacloadcalculate.com ↩

16. Systems pushed to unusually low thermostat targets during extreme heat may run nonstop without reaching the set temperature. WCYB ↩