How to cool down a house when the AC breaks during a heatwave
When an air conditioner breaks down during a heatwave, offices and maintenance services are often closed, leaving homes stuck at dangerously high temperatures. A dirty filter can cause the cooling coils to freeze up and stop the system entirely, leaving occupants scrambling for emergency DIY fixes to survive extreme heat.
What people tried
Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.
- 1Turn the AC off and keep the fan on to unfreeze it, then replace the filter.
- 2turned off the unit and put on the fan
- 3contacted the landlord
In their words
Unedited, grouped by where they were said, most upvoted first within each place, each linked to the thread it came from.
“Is there any redneck way to fix this just for a few days? It’s Sunday so the office won’t even be open to get maintenance and it’s still gonna be 90 degrees outside today.”source ↗
“We’re in a heatwave and the AC isn’t working. I set the thermostat to 73/70/66 and the temp remained 88 all day.”source ↗
“Filter got so dirty that it got sucked in the return and probably caused the coil to freeze up.”source ↗