My wife had a house party with her girlfriends on probably the hottest day of the summer. I had been out, doing my own thing all day, only to come back to the house at 10pm with the temperature reading 90 degrees.

My wife thinks nothing of it, she likes it hot but I wasn't about to die in my sleep from heat exhaustion so I started poking around the AC.

I could hear the thermostat kick on to signal the AC to turn on so I was confident that wasn't the issue.

The air handler for the house wasn't that old at that point and I didn't see any obvious issues.

I went outside to look at the unit and it was literally too hot to touch. Hmmm... didn't know what to do but since it was late on a Saturday, I had time to play around with it before trying to get a technician on Monday. So I broke out the spare floor unit A/C's that we had and did my best to make a couple rooms bearable for the night.

The next morning, I go back to tinkering with the unit. I flip some breakers and still no dice but I do notice an occasional electric hum from the outside unit. I do my Google's and find out that these units have a capacitor for kickstarting the fan that cools the bell housing that's filled with the refrigerant.

I decide to kickstart the fan manually with a stick and boom, it's spinning! At this point, I'm pretty sure it's just the capacitor so I order one on Amazon for next day delivery ($30 total).

The next day, I remove the old capacitor (after shorting it out), install the new capacitor and we're back in business. It would've cost $80 just to get someone out there just to look at it but I was able to do it myself for less than half.

In hindsight, that incident probably accelerated the demise of the air handler because I had to replace leaking coils a couple years later