This is when smart gets stupid. I'm a bit worried about this with my nest and other smart devices, but even with normal air conditioners there are a few stupid simple problems that will cost you hundreds of dollars!
A couple of weeks ago my AC blower fan stopped working, the compressor would run. I went up and found out that the capacitor was bad, and took a picture of it, buying a replacement. Took about 15 minutes to replace and I probably saved myself at least $400 (no AC is an emergency in the desert, and they will charge you accordingly).
The great thing about Australia is that that is probably illegal here.
We've got some pretty fucked up protectionist rules about what you can and can't do in/to your own home. It's nuts.
Now, nobody is actually watching most of the time, so you're usually fine, but it's as stupid as being illegal to replace a tap or existing light fitting. Every so often state governments review the rules and get swamped by trade associations who say the rules are there to prevent people being 'scammed' by untrained 'handymen' and are there for your own protection. This regulatory capture means that legally you need to complete a four year apprenticeship before you're allowed to change a plug! And another one if you want to do any basic water plumbing.
I wouldn't be surprised if what the guy did in this blog is strictly speaking illegal - for instance when it comes to data cables, you need to be a qualified electrician with data specialty to install them. You can plug ethernet cables into your computers yourself (wow! such privilege!), but if you install them even by getting some stick-on plastic conduit and passing the cable through that, you're in contravention and could potentially be fined, up to thousands of dollars. For sticking some plastic tubes to the wall in your own house.
Reminds me how, in USA, it’s the only civilized nation I’ve been to where you must have a prescription to purchase contacts and glasses. Everywhere else I’ve been will just sell you whatever magnification you need at the pharmacy.
Obviously there is some acceptable line here, but I think the States handles this decently well enough. In Austin where I live you can get what is called a “homeowners permit” in a lot of cases. Meaning the city will come look at your work and as long as it’s up to code you get a legal permit just like a contractor would get (https://www.austintexas.gov/page/homeowners-permit). You can only do this to your own home so it’s not a shortcut to running a chuck in a truck business without a license.
There's an easy hack for the contact lens (and maybe glasses?) situation. There is a consumer protection law meant to ensure eye doctors can't stop you from using any retailer you want (otherwise they'd essentially make themselves your retailer), and it works like this:
You place an order with the retailer (online retailers typically allow you to simply type in your prescription values when adding lenses to your online cart; you don't need to show an official written prescription) and specify your doctor's name and phone number. Upon receiving your order, the retailer must call the doctor to see whether the doctor objects (invalid prescription). The retailer is to ship the order only if there is no objection (including no response at all) within 8 business hours. So just give the retailer the name and number of someone who won't immediately object, which is quite easy (e.g. a permanently closed office).
Of course, you need a refraction to know your prescription values. But once that's done, if your vision doesn't change over time, this allows you to ignore the expiration date of the prescription.
US based online contact vendors reject orders without a signed prescription. The doctors intentionally don't sign them. The workaround is to order them from Canada
I couldn't find a Canadian (or any foreign) retailer that would ship to the US, but I found tons of US retailers that allow self-entry (as an alternative to uploading a signed prescription) as I described.
As will several other retailers, but only in some states. As someone in an excluded state, I considered whether enabling Mock Location on my phone would get me past that check (I think they require you to use a native mobile app, so I assume they use location from that?) but then thought of the method I mentioned earlier instead.
Haha well the thing is, a vision exam requires that you read letters of a certain height from a certain distance while proctored, and presumably this is quite difficult to achieve in telehealth with more open computer systems. Of course some folks can figure out how to break anything (I mean, just plug a projector/TV into your phone with a usb-hdmi adapter and now the letters are huge?) but I think it keeps things easy and reasonably accurate among normies.
I purchase my glasses from Zenni, and I don't believe I've ever had to give them the name of my doctor.
On the other hand, maybe I typed that in when I was first signing up two decades ago, and the optometrist I gave them has long since gone out of business?
I also order from Zenni and have never had to provide my doctor's info. They happily create lenses with whatever prescription I type in, and for me personally it usually takes a couple years for it to change enough to warrant new glasses. (I still get an exam annually)
Getting a prescription when you don't know what you need makes sense. Getting one just because your last one has expired (1 year) is the off-putting aspect.
My first thought is - how do you get the contact information for a closed office?
My current hack, which is not as great as yours, is to put a reminder on my calendar for a few days before my 1 year prescription ends. If I order new contacts in the one year period for another year’s worth of contacts (even if I am not out yet), I essentially get to go 2 years between visits. I will try your hack next if I can figure out a good way to get contact info for an office that won’t object.
Google it. When places like this go out of business, local news articles get written. Or just pick randomly among ones still in business, worst case your order gets canceled?
There's an even bigger hack: use photoshop to modify the prescription. My wife has been doing it for years. This is helpful since sometimes the prescription is over-specific and points to contacts you don't like.
I considered that of course, but something about the signature on it (as opposed to self entry which has no signature) made me very uneasy. And doesn't the verification phone call (which fails unsafe, luckily) happen either way? Maybe not.
They must not be making this verification call since we've been doing this for years. Yes, it's straightforward forgery, so your unease is warranted. But I have no problem breaking pointless laws.
Yeah my beef isn’t around the actual requirement of determining your prescription. Obviously you should wear eyeglasses/contacts that match your vision requirements. I think this is especially relevant when we are talking about usage with a drivers license. The ridiculous part is the arbitrary 1 year renewal. As you imply it is really only necessary to recheck that often when your vision is changing a lot which is usually not something that happens after some period in your 20’s.
Neat trick though. I got lasik a few years ago but I would do this if I hadnt
> Reminds me how, in USA, it’s the only civilized nation I’ve been to where you must have a prescription to purchase contacts and glasses
Anecdotally this is far from true. Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK for example require a prescription for anything more complicated than reading glasses.
There are plenty of reasons why, mostly summed up by your comment about “whatever magnification you need” - eyeglasses for distance vision are infinitely more complex than “magnification” and if you’re buying anything other than reading glasses without a proper exam and matched lenses, you’re doing yourself harm.
Unless of course you are talking about reading glasses, in which case you’re also wrong, as you can get those for a couple of bucks pretty much anywhere in the US with no prescription.
> [...] the Netherlands, [...] for example require a prescription for anything more complicated than reading glasses.
I have never needed a prescription to get (non-reading) glasses in the Netherlands. In fact, there are webshops where you can purchase any pair of glasses (obviously, you have to enter the values of an eye examination).
I'm not sure that's true about the UK and prescription glasses. When I moved back here I packed my glasses up in storage so was going to be without for 6/8 weeks before our stuff arrived. I went onto Glasses Direct[1] and ordered 2 new pairs of glasses for £50 by putting in my prescription details from another country. The glasses themselves are regulated as medical equipment, but you could go on there and buy any prescription you want and nothing will stop you.
> Anecdotally this is far from true. Canada, Australia, the Netherlands, and the UK for example require a prescription for anything more complicated than reading glasses.
I’m in Canada. To order glasses I just punch the few numbers from the optometrist into any random website and glasses show up. That’s… kind of necessary if you want lenses that actually correct for your vision.
With Americans in this thread talking about them trying to verify with the optometrist and stuff… I don’t think we’re in the same league at all.
I am not sure about Canadas situation since that is where I used to order my contacts from before I got LASIK several years ago. I don’t recall having to provide a script then. But Mexico and several other European countries I’ve been to (Sweden as an example) it’s absolutely the case you can just walk into the pharmacy and grab the magnification you need with no prescription. I am actually surprised you were able to provide that many counter examples but I’ve never tried to buy contacts in the countries you’ve listed outside of Canada
> it’s absolutely the case you can just walk into the pharmacy and grab the magnification you need with no prescription.
I don’t understand how this could possibly work. Contact lenses have at least three parameters to define the lens. It’s not just “magnification”.
If you have an astigmatism, there are two more, and a further two if you have presbyopia (for a total of up to 7). Almost everyone has presbyopia by the age of 65, so it’s not some rare condition.
Do these pharmacies you speak of just have aisles upon aisles of contact lenses?
When I was in Germany, I saw vending machines where you could buy contacts. Sure, there's a lot of possible values, but they probably only stock the most popular ones.
Here in Japan, you can easily buy contacts from optical stores. They have several shelves behind the counters where they stock many varieties. Sometimes they even put a bunch of unsold/unpopular ones out front for 1/2 off (a lot of these are color contacts). I get mine online; I don't need a prescription.
One thing I did notice, as someone with astigmatism, is that the number of possible values is less here. My axis back in the US was 100, but here I have to use 90; they just don't carry them in all the possible axis values here.
Not aisles upon aisles but yeah for instance in Apotek, a big pharmacy chain in Sweden, there is usually a whole wall of them with little drawers to pick from. As sibling comment mentioned there isn’t every combination available so presumably you have to special order some if you have some weird combination but for myself who never had astigmatism at all it was perfectly fine.
Yeah in the UK where I spent most of my life, it seems like you do whatever you want, pretty much. Golden rule - you don't touch gas plumbing. And you don't mess with your circuit breaker board/RCDs etc. I think installing new ring circuits may be off limits.
Anything else? Go for it. I fitted a bunch of taps and a toilet, changed single sockets to double+USB sockets, changed light fittings, fixed poorly wired lighting circuits, installed Cat-6 through the walls to a few rooms, all sorts of stuff. And none of it was anyone else's business. You can (should?) get a professional inspection and safety certificate before you sell the house, but that's about it AFAICT.
I'd be happy enough with the situation in Austin, so long as the city inspections were cheap or free. I'd be happy enough to do a short course in the basics before getting some sort of permit. Where we are now is nuts.
(But at least I can buy a pair of generic reading glasses pretty much wherever here!)
The inspections themselves here are reasonably priced, but it’s still annoying to deal with the city because they operate in 1995. There’s no portal for scheduling inspections for homeowners, you have to call them. They don’t tell you when they will show up on the day they will perform them, so you have to be available at home from 7-17 ready to instantly answer the door at a moments notice the second they knock or you will miss them and have to reschedule
The pricing is reasonable enough - it’s cheap enough to actually be worthwhile to do several things yourself that normally you’d have to pay a contractor for. I did it when I ran some electrical conduit to my garage to add a few 120V receptacles in there.
My general rule of thumb is also I won’t touch gas. But also anything like plumbing that is INSIDE walls I usually am looking to have a professional handle as well. It’s harder to fix knucklehead DIY mistakes when they are covered up behind drywall.
It does make me want more plumbing setups like I’ve seen in Europe. When I lived in Sweden I loved for instance that a lot of bathroom plumbing is completely exposed, so DIY’ing plumbing work is actually pretty accessible. Here where you have to dig into the walls to get at it makes it much less appealing since not only do you have to be a a decent plumber you also have to be a decent drywall person as well.
Watching "Scrapheap Challenge" has taught me the UK has a lot of regulations about steam engines.
One of the behind-the-scene videos was something like "that old steam-powered whatever they just happened to find in the scrapheap? Yeah, we've got the inspection certificate right here."
Australia is definitely one of the most rule-obsessed countries, even in comparison to Germany, where I’ve lived for the last decade or so. Parts of my parent’s house back home are heritage listed, some rules make sense and some are bizarre, especially regarding the garden.
Heritage listing is it's own thing. What I hate is the rules surrounding...essentially any home services. Like it took me a long time to realize when people in the US were saying they "needed to get something up to code" what they meant was, that they themselves didn't feel up to doing the work and it would cost them. But like...you can. You can just call the guys and double-check what needs to be done and do it yourself and get it inspected.
Whereas in Australia the answer is, it's all illegal, and if you're not a licensed whoever then they don't want to tell you how it should be done in case gasp you do it yourself.
So of course everyone does do it themselves, and lies about it. And the quality of workmanship from the trades is...poor.
Yeah it's not like the work done by the trades is always a shining example of competence.
I can and often do do a better job on things myself, because I have more time and I care about getting it right. And with the apparent trade shortage (at least in part caused by how much you need them for real basic shit), it's expensive and half the time the bastards won't answer the phone or don't show up to appointments. So stuff gets done on the down-low or it just doesn't get done at all.
Gotta love the signs at the hardware store saying "You can buy this stuff but if you even think about installing it yourself, that's illegal!"
I moved back to Perth from Berlin last year, and yeah, agree completely. Germans have a reputation for being rule-obsessed but they're lax compared to the Aussies, who have a reputation for being larrikins that is almost completely undeserved. It's all "beer & bbq on the beach" until you find out that's illegal and the police will pour out your beer on the sand and fine you for the bbq.
See also "Wowser", the opposite side of the coin. At some point it seems the wowsers gained the upper hand.
What's left of larrikinism unfortunately seems to be cooked in the head these days. Australian politics is sorely in need of some decent larrikins, but they seem to be AWOL.
Yeah it’s striking whenever I visit again. I guess there’s that famous quote about Australians being the descendants of not just criminals but also jailers which makes sense.
Germans tend to obsess over rules and processes in bureaucratic contexts and when it infringes on others but are very open with personal freedoms.
The nice thing about my Mitsubishi Heavy Industry units is I've got a bunch of MHI-AC-Ctrl[1] modules tucked into them talking to the service interface with Home Assistant. The neat thing is it doesn't just control it, it also makes all the internal sensors and codes available.
What I think we really need to do though is make publishing these control standards mandatory under right-to-repair laws - no one should need to be reverse engineering them, you bring a product to market you have to provide the complete spec for it's software interface and data.
Do that, and I bet we'd find in a few years every new appliance would support a common serial port standard and come with a code page in the manual for it (ironically the prevalence of Tuya-smart stuff has come very close to making this happen, but they go to absurd lengths to lock you out of the wi-fi microcontrollers).
I'd love this, but right now I'd be happy with a team reverse engineering these things and not getting hit with some kind of IP lawsuit from whatever company. I think there's going to be a lot of abandoned-ware IoT stuff, mostly because the company wants to turn the software off because they don't make money from supporting old products.
My fitbit wifi scale, which I love and has been doing a great job for the last 10 years has now lost support to pair it with the new fitbit app, thanks Google!
One problem I've found with a bunch of my own stuff though is microcontroller firmwares. Tons of devices have some type of microcontroller running them, and if the CPU is what goes (which happened on a bunch of Yamaha amps I've dealt with) then it goes right up in the air as to whether sourcing a replacement part is practical because you can't even get a binary blob to shoot onto it.
Network-connected home Mitsubishi units can be controlled with the MELCloud API (same api used by mobile app) which makes it easy enough to write scripts that grab current temp, settings, power usage.
Perhaps someone has already made a home assistant plugin that does this?
Everyone reading this should find out what capacitor they need and buy one off Amazon, they're all <$20.
I've done this repair myself, it takes maybe <15 minutes and is almost impossible to mess up. Even if you were find spending a couple hundred dollars to have someone come out and do it, you'd still go hours at least without AC. Which depending on the time of year can be miserable.
You have to be careful with Amazon/eBay caps, as they can be cheap chinesium garbage. I look for name-brand caps when I can and try to get them off eBay, Grainger, or Repairclinic.
You don't need the same model number as the original cap, it just has to have the same voltage rating, capacitance, and number of terminals. You might have to get creative with the mounting solution if the new cap is different than the old one in terms of shape or size.
Also, pro-tip: when you replace a the cap in the outside unit, install it upside-down so that water doesn't pool on top of the cap and rust it out from the top.
I have a gas furnace and I also keep a spare ignitor handy. It's not a matter of "if" those go bad, it's "when."
Just don’t cook yourself with the remaining good capacitance.
Personally, I wonder what could be done to temporarily get the capacitor to “kick” for a few more times to get your home temperature down as you get your replacement. Chill the capacitor?
It depends on the failure mode of the cap. If it has blown its dielectric, then chilling it may cause the plates to separate enough to boost the capacitance, but it is more likely to just be a waste of time.
Aside from that, you could strap on other capacitors as long as their voltage is the right value. A daisy chain of 50mf capacitors to shore up the blown capacitance might buy you a day or so of usage.
Best bet, if you have an old broken microwave nearby, would be to pull the cap from it and wire it in.
Don't buy electronics components from marketplaces of any kind. There are reputable parts suppliers and for things that are common and in stock it will probably even be cheaper and faster than buying the same thing (of unknown provenance and quality) from who knows what seller on random marketplace.
Please don’t suggest buying electrical parts off Amazon, that’s criminal negligence. On second thought, please do not give any electrical advice on the internet.
Buy it from McMaster Carr or Grainger, please!! If you do this repair yourself, short the contacts of the capacitor (ideally with a correctly sized resistor) to discharge it before handling it so you don’t electrocute yourself.
McMaster will get it to your house next-day in lots of places too, and you don't have to deal with the local hvac supply house refusing to sell to a walk-in customer that isn't an employed hvac tech.
I did something similar for a clothes drier. The thing was ancient (mid-80’s) but was fantastic. It was huge and you could dry maybe 3 comforters under an hour.
It stopped heating and it turned out there are solenoids that control the natural gas flow. Quick disassembly (back when products were made for easy repair) and swapping out two $8 solenoids from Amazon and I was back in business.
+1. Repair all sorts of stuff... Capresso burr grinder, little plastic knob broke off inside, repaired with a 10c washer and glue... worked great for years and you'd never know...
I highly recommend people who live in hot environments to keep a spare capacitor on hand. Even if you know how to fix it, if the AC dies when your local HVAC supply store is closed (eg not between 7am-7pm Monday through Saturday usually) you’re either stuck paying out the nose to a contractor who has one on hand during emergency hours or you’re sweating it out waiting for the store to open. While they are readily available components that consumers can purchase, they aren’t things that Walmart carries. But HVAC supply shops will sell them to you, you don’t need to be licensed or anything to buy them. You can also just get them on Amazon, likely for cheaper than the HVAC supply shop will sell them to you.
It really is an easy repair. Needs a screwdriver and knowledge enough to shut off the electricity to touch the wires. According to code every one of these condenser units outside has a disconnect right there so you don’t even need to turn off the power at the breaker box. Just pull that disconnect, open up your outdoor condenser unit, snap a pic of the specs on the capacitor (it’s the only thing that looks like a soda can) and order one off Amazon and stash it somewhere. It’s a tiny part. It will take like 5 minutes max and save you several hundred bucks and a lot of sweat eventually.
FWIW, when ac dies it’s usually in this order of root causes:
Float switch: your condensate drain line got clogged because it just does and you need to clear it. You can proactively prevent this by pouring bleach or vinegar down the line periodically (what clogs it is usually some sort of gnarly plant like growth from all the moisture) or if it’s clogged you need to clear it. The hvac guys will charge you 300 bucks to blow pressurized air through the pipe or you can literally just duct tape a wet shop vac to the thing and suck it out yourself. Attachments can be purchased on Amazon for reasonable price.
A capacitor issue is the second most common. If it ain’t the float switch almost always it’s the capacitor. You can increase your capacitor longevity and also decrease your electric bill by changing your air filter regularly but also hosing down the outside condenser coils every few months or so. Almost everyone knows about the air filter but few people know about hosing down the coils. This makes a HUGE difference. We are talking like 20-30% of your electric bill in hot climates if you don’t do it. Just take a hose and spray downward on the grates and get all that dust and dead grass from mowing out of there. You won’t hurt the thing. Why does this help? Well, it’s better to think of AC not as adding cool air. There’s no such thing as adding cool air. Only removal of heat. How does heat get removed out of your house? Through that condenser unit. If those grates are clogged up the heat cannot escape and the unit must work harder to do less effective job. So keep those coils clean.
Everything else after that is way less common. Yeah compressors do die. Motors die. Refrigerant leaks. Computer components die. Thermostats fail. However it’s very rare that the issue is something other than these two things in comparison. Like probably 80% of all HVAC residential calls are probably the above two things I mentioned.
I want to emphasize for others how important this comment is. I live in suburban Atlanta and last month the AC failed. Can you guess what day and time it failed? Yep, 8AM on 96F/70% humidity SUNDAY. And we moved into this f*cking old house a year earlier after moving across the country so no local knowledge of contractors. After about 15 minutes in google maps I call up my best guess based entirely on internet vibes. After some hemming and hawing which is best described as a verbal biopsy of my wallet ("it's going to be $200 for showing up") the dude shows up. We get to talking as one does (I DIY everything) and he says I'll show you how to fix it, it's very likely the capacitor is the problem.
So he unscrews the panel, pulls off the leads, puts in the new capacitor and voila.
Then the guy says basically exactly what the above para starting with "A capacitor issue...", including hosing down the coils.
So in 10 minutes I learned another mandatory skill on a Sunday morning, and it only cost $675. (Yes I know better than to place my tongue across the capacitor connectors)
Last year I fixed the condensate drain line clog myself, by uh, well, I was in a hurry, blowing into the pretty grotty drain line. I did purchase the exact model pump for a spare.
> But HVAC supply shops will sell them to you, you don’t need to be licensed or anything to buy them.
My local HVAC supplier doesn't sell to non-licensed people. I think they don't like dealing with returns from people who don't know what they're doing. I needed a 24vac transformer once. My dad used the same HVAC company for his office for a long time, they still remembered him, and had the part I needed in stock.
Two summers ago my AC didn't sound right. IIRC the outside unit was clicking on and off. I pulled the breaker. Eventually I decided the problem was with the contactor (a switch controlled by 24vac). I took pictures of where the wires were connected and pulled the contactor. For no particular reason I started taking the old contactor apart, and found a cricket in the middle. I removed the bug, cleaned out the cricket residue, put the contactor back together, and returned it to the outside unit. My AC system resumed working perfectly. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contactor
I’ve heard of this in the past. Usually the shop will sell to you without a license if you’re affiliated with an HVAC company, because you might be some unlicensed peon picking up parts for the installer or technician down the road. But they often have no way to verify whether you’re a HVAC person for things that don’t require a license vs some clued in homeowner, so you can give them a made up LLC name and say you want a cash account. It takes a fair bit of confidence to pull this off though. Easier and cheaper to order off of Amazon usually anyway
FWIW there are some things that DO require licensing. Purchasing refrigerant requires an EPA number. Almost no shop will sell you full on ready to install systems without a contractors license. But off the shelf components like this don’t require one and they have unlicensed helpers coming in all the time buying stuff, so confidently pretending you’re one of those is usually enough in a pinch.
I had some more R134a added to my car recently. The mechanic said when he had his shop, he would have completely evacuated the system to measure how many ounces of refrigerant were still in the system. He also said the old R12 systems were less leaky than R134a. R12 was phased out because of the ozone layer.
I think refrigerator and AC repair companies are required to capture and recycle the refrigerant - they don’t seem to have the equipment to capture and measure refrigerant like auto mechanics.
R22 (phased out refrigerant for home AC) has chlorine in it, while R134a doesn’t have chlorine, making it easier on the ozone layer. R134a is being replaced with R1234yf.
The best refrigerant is CO2, but this has the greatest tendency to leak.
>I think refrigerator and AC repair companies are required to capture and recycle the refrigerant - they don’t seem to have the equipment to capture and measure refrigerant like auto mechanics.
I'm pretty sure they capture it and then sell it back to you while making you think that that isn't what's happening.
A lot of supply houses only sell to people with an account setup. It's not that you need to be a liscenced contractor, they just aren't setup for retail sale. This often extends to not even having a till, customers create an account with net 30/60 terms.
A good way to check if a place does retail sale is to ask for the city desk when calling in.
It's actually worse than that here in Austin. The was only 1 store that would sell me a individual capacitor when mine failed. That one failed about 3 days later. I did some research online and apparently there was just a massive production run of capacitors that were imported to the US and are known to be bad. Supply houses were just looking to offload them.
Now I could take it back for a warranty replacement, which would give me the same defective unit.
As a result of this, I don't even recommend buying components locally any more. The capacitor from amazon cost about $12 and is still working years later.
I also live in Austin and got my recent capacitor replacement from Johnstone when mine failed on a Saturday and I didn't have a backup handy. It was, IIRC, around $50. Significantly more expensive than Amazon.
The capacitors size themselves are small. They slightly vary but are almost always the size of a medium Red Bull can. They are sized to your unit though so you can’t just buy one without looking at the specs and expect it to work. But the specs are printed on the side of the can and if not can be derived from the specs on the unit itself.
As far as their danger there really isn’t any beyond getting shocked from dealing with live wires. Technically they can retain a bit of a charge so I’ve seen recommendations to wait X amount of time before touching them with your bare hands or to discharge it by touching it with an insulated screwdriver to discharge it but the risk is pretty low. Once the power is off (either at the breaker or via the disconnect at the condenser unit, power only goes in one way to those things so if you turn it off in one place there’s no way you’ll get a zap) it’s a soda can with 3 wires going into it. You just disconnect the 3 wires from the old soda can, remove it, replace and connect the new one. Not that much harder than changing a light bulb.
the capacitors are connected across the motor windings and are there essentially as a way to shift the phase of the current waveform. note that this is a two-phase power special; you don't need start or run capacitors if you're using 3-phase power (uncommon in North American residential settings, but YMMV worldwide)
when power is disconnected they are not charged at all. it's not like the capacitors you might find in a CRT
So what you are saying is that the capacitors are effectively shorted with the motor coil, and hence they have a drain resistor that has effectively no resistance?
My A/C failed in the same way and with some help from youtube and a multimeter I debugged it to the same problem. Replaced it with this one: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GSU47TQ
There's a bunch of similar capacitors on Amazon (or your local hardware store). They're about the size of a soda can. I believe the "old" capacitor in your A/C can zap you if you don't ground the lines together when you pull it out, if you watch youtube videos for this repair they'll ground it with a screwdriver or other metal object.
Turn off the power or pull the local disconnect. Also, short out the capacitor before touching it. You can do that by connecting the terminals with your screwdriver. There are plenty of yt vids explaining the process.
When I see large capacitors (for me it’s more girth than my little finger), I have alarm bells going on. One « soda can sized » can definitely kill you. It should be discharged before messing with it. You can buy capacitor drains (basically a big ass resistor) that you put across the capacitor’s legs to drain the energy in it.
Some do it with an insulated screwdriver but that’s dangerous because it’s a short, can ark, fuse the driver to the capacitor, and result in a bad day.
it's recommended to give it some time if it's been running and to short across the terminals with something, like a screwdriver that has a non conducting handle. It's nothing too ridiculous.
A couple of weeks ago my AC blower fan stopped working, the compressor would run. I went up and found out that the capacitor was bad, and took a picture of it, buying a replacement. Took about 15 minutes to replace and I probably saved myself at least $400 (no AC is an emergency in the desert, and they will charge you accordingly).
Fixing household appliances can be fun too!