AC tune-up checklist: how to tell if yours actually happened
By Brandon Bamba, Mission Commander · August 5, 2026 · 7 min read
By Brandon Bamba, Mission Commander · August 5, 2026 · 7 min read
You paid for a tune-up. Somebody was at your house for forty minutes, handed you an invoice that said “performed maintenance,” and drove off. Whether the work actually got done is mostly checkable, and you don’t need a license or a meter to check it.
Below is the AC tune-up checklist the written industry standard actually calls for, five items you can confirm yourself, and a call we got this summer that we were never supposed to get.
A homeowner here in the Valley dialed the wrong company. He meant to reach the outfit that installed his system. The call landed with us instead.
We drove out anyway. Before anything else, our Space Tech told him straight: we are not the company that installed this system, and we are not the company that serviced it six weeks ago. If you’d rather we turn around, we will.
He asked us to stay and tell him what we found. He also asked that nothing be touched without his say-so. That’s our policy regardless, so it was an easy yes.
His system was about a year old. A one-year-old unit that was maintained six weeks ago is the last place anybody expects to find a skipped step.
Two things came back. The condensate drain was blocked. And a meaningful amount of cooled air was escaping the ductwork in his crawl space before it ever reached the first floor, which explained something he had noticed for a long time and had never had explained to him.
Then the part that mattered most. We handed him the tablet with the findings on it, walked out the front door, and let him and his wife talk in their own house without two strangers standing in the room. They took as long as they wanted. They came back out and told us what they’d decided.
There’s an actual written standard for this, and almost no homeowner has heard of it.
It’s ANSI/ACCA 4 QM-2019, Quality Maintenance of Residential HVAC Systems, published by the Air Conditioning Contractors of America and recognized by the American National Standards Institute. It’s the closest thing the trade has to a definition of the word “maintenance.” Most invoices never reference it.
One task on that list, in the standard’s own words:
Inspect condensate drain piping (and traps) for proper operation. Clean, insulate, repair, or replace as necessary.
That isn’t an add-on. It’s a line item inside the service you already bought.
Here’s why it carries so much weight in Alabama. Your air conditioner is a dehumidifier that happens to cool. ACCA puts residential condensate output at 5 to 20 gallons a day depending on system size, runtime, and how much moisture is in the air. In a Huntsville August, you live at the top of that range. Every gallon of it leaves your house through one narrow PVC line, and bacteria and fungus build up inside that line all season. When it plugs, water backs up into the pan and then into the ceiling or the closet floor under the pan. Or a float switch cuts the whole system off and you’re making a phone call at 9 PM.
Clearing that line takes a few minutes on a visit that’s already happening. Skipping it costs you a drywall repair. New equipment doesn’t get a pass on this. A one-year-old coil pulls just as much water out of Alabama air as a ten-year-old one.
None of these need a tool. Run them the evening after your next tune-up.
Start with the company that did it. Ask them for the completed task list from that tune-up with the readings on it. Any shop running a real maintenance program has that on file and will send it over. Most of the time you’ll get it, the numbers will be there, and you can stop worrying. That’s the outcome we’d want if it were our house.
If they can’t produce it, or you’d just rather have a second set of eyes on it, call us. We’ll come look either way. And if the answer turns out to be nothing’s wrong here, we’ll say that out loud and go home. Sometimes that is the answer.
We didn’t try to sell him anything he didn’t need.
There wasn’t much to sell. The drain was a few minutes of work. The duct sealing was real work with a reason he could see for himself, because his first floor had never cooled the way the rest of the house did and now he knew why. That was the list. That was the whole list.
And we can’t tell you what happened at that house six weeks before we walked in. We weren’t there. We don’t know what got checked, what got skipped, or what that tech was told to do that day. All we can honestly report is the condition of the equipment when we opened it up, and that’s exactly what we told the homeowner, in those words. Anybody who tells you more than that about a job they weren’t on is guessing.
He joined the Moonwalk Club.
Sit with that for a second. His system was about a year old and still under warranty. He already had a maintenance relationship with the company that installed it. On paper he had no reason to move, and no money to save by moving.
He moved anyway. Not for a price, because we never gave him one to compare. He moved because we told him what we were and weren’t before we touched anything, because we handed him the tablet and stood in his yard while he and his wife made up their own minds, and because we picked up after ourselves on the way out.
He got the better end of it. He found out the thing bothering him about his own house had a cause and a fix. We got a customer out of a house where somebody else had every structural advantage.
That trade doesn’t show up anywhere on that day’s invoice. It shows up on the next twelve.
Book a Pre-Flight Check. You get a written field report with the actual readings on it, not a sentence.
Then take the AC tune-up checklist above and check our work. If we miss one, we want to hear about it.