Hi all, I was wondering if I could gather some opinions on a situation I currently have with my AC system? A lot of reading coming up so I apologize for the text but I want to put out all the information I currently have.

A few weeks ago I came home from work and my house felt noticeably warmer than it should have been. I typically keep my thermostat set at 76 degrees. When I checked the thermostat, it was reading at 81 so I knew there was an issue. I went out to my breaker panel in the garage and the AC breaker had tripped. So I turned it back on and the unit started back up.

However, I am enrolled in an energy saving program and I come to find out that it was a cycle day for people enrolled in that program. From what I understand, it's not uncommon for the breaker to throw when the electric company cuts the power to the AC unit during these cycling events.

So I was being cycled until 7 pm that night and the breaker threw one more time during the cycling event. However, after the cycle was over, the breaker never tripped again.

My AC unit ran fine for a week until that following Friday when there was another cycling event. Once again, I come home from work and the breaker had tripped. However, this time I noticed that the breaker in the panel moved when I reset it. I know that should absolutely not happen and I figured that the loose breaker could be my issue here. I turned the power off, pulled the breaker out (which literally came right out with hardly any force) and went to Home Depot to purchase a replacement. Came home, stuck it in (felt nice and tight) and fired it up. I walked out back to check the unit and it was running, however, the box that the electric company installs to control the cycling events seemed to be turned off. There is typically a little green light that is lit when I'm not being cycled and when I am cycled, the light inside the box turns red. There was no light at all which I just chalked up to the fact that I just changed the breaker and maybe it just needed time to reboot.

Fast forward to this past Sunday which is about a day and a half after I replaced the breaker. The AC unit seemed to be working just fine but the cycling box was still not showing a light which I thought was odd considering it should have rebooted by then. I figure everything was working ok so I went back to cutting the grass.

So yesterday I get a call from my wife and she says the house is really hot and that the thermostat was showing 81 degrees. I told her to check the breaker box and sure enough, the breaker had thrown. She reset it and the AC fired back up again. When I got home from work, I went out back to check the unit again and now the cycling box had a blinking green light and eventually it stopped blinking and just stayed a solid green when I checked it again about a hour later. The AC was still working fine and was still running fine as of this morning when I left the house.

My next step in this process was to clean out the condenser coil of and any other debris. I'm still going to do this but I was wondering if you think my problems are centered around this cycling box that is attached to my outside AC unit? I did take a look inside the unit and it's quite clean but that doesn't mean the coils can't be clogged. The dryer vent is close to the AC unit so if lint is getting sucked into the coils, I wouldn't be able to see that anyway.

The box has been on there for years and I've never had this problem but it just seems that everything I'm experiencing seems tied to cycling events or that cycling box attached to the AC unit.

The compressor was manufactured in 1997 so it has age but it's blowing very cold air when it's running, the breaker doesn't feel hot, and I thought that if I was having a grounding issue, the breaker would trip right away. I don't think the unit was installed until after 1997 though but I'm not 100% as I'm the second owner of the house which we purchased in 2010. The AC unit is a Trane XL 1200.

Maybe the compressor is going up but I was hoping to at least get one more summer out of it. It's not a heat pump as I have natural gas heat for the winter so the unit is only running a little over 3 months of the year.

Just wondering if anyone has had similar experiences when dealing with these cycling boxes that the electric company installs?