Check the air conditioning before you close on a Florida house

In Southwest Florida the air conditioning is the most heavily used mechanical system in the building and one of the most expensive to replace. A general home inspection will confirm it runs and produces cold air. That is a much lower bar than it sounds, and it is the gap where most unpleasant first-summer surprises live.

What a home inspection actually covers

A standard inspection is visual and functional. The inspector turns the system on, measures the temperature difference between supply and return air, looks at accessible ductwork and the condition of the equipment, and notes visible defects. It is a competent screening and it is what the fee pays for.

What it does not include: connecting gauges to the refrigerant circuit, calculating superheat and subcooling, measuring static pressure, testing capacitor capacitance, or evaluating whether the system is correctly sized for the house. Most inspection agreements explicitly exclude refrigerant work, because it requires certification the inspector may not hold.

The consequence is specific. A system with a slow refrigerant leak, a capacitor at the end of its life, or ductwork leaking a fifth of its air into the attic will pass a general inspection while cooling the house. It will also fail in the first serious heat of the following summer, and by then the transaction is long closed.

Three things you can check yourself in ten minutes

The data plate. On the outdoor unit, usually on the side panel. It gives the manufacturer, model, serial, tonnage and refrigerant type. Most manufacturers encode the year of manufacture in the serial number, and a web search for the brand's serial format decodes it in a minute. Age is the single most predictive fact about remaining life: in this climate, ten to fifteen years is a realistic span, so a twelve-year-old system is late middle age however well it is running.

The refrigerant type. Also on the data plate. R-22 means the system predates 2010 and the refrigerant has not been produced or imported since 2020, so any leak repair is priced against dwindling stock. R-410A is the standard of the last fifteen years and remains serviceable, although equipment using it stopped being manufactured on 1 January 2025. R-454B or R-32 indicates recent equipment.

The efficiency rating. New split systems under 45,000 BTU sold in the Southeast must meet at least 14.3 SEER2. Older equipment carries an SEER rating on an older test standard, so the numbers are not directly comparable, but a low figure on an old plate tells you what the summer bills will look like.

Where the seller's history is written down

Two public records fill in what the equipment cannot tell you. The first is the permit file at the city or county building department. A system replacement should appear as a mechanical permit with a passed inspection. An expensive-looking new unit with no permit on record raises two questions: who installed it, and will the manufacturer's warranty stand up, since many warranties depend on installation by a licensed contractor and on registration within a fixed window.

The second is the seller's disclosure and any service records they hold. Ask for invoices. A file showing annual maintenance is a genuinely good sign. A file showing refrigerant added in three consecutive years is a leak nobody fixed, and it is worth more than any verbal assurance about the system's condition.

Ask directly whether the manufacturer's warranty is transferable. Many are, within a limited window after the sale and sometimes for a fee. That is a question with a real dollar answer and it is easy to miss in the volume of paperwork around a closing.

The independent HVAC inspection

For any system over eight years old, or where the general inspection flags anything, a separate visit by an HVAC contractor is worth the modest cost. It is a different scope of work: gauges on the system, superheat and subcooling calculated, static pressure read, electrical components measured, coils inspected, drain and float switch tested, and an assessment of whether the equipment is sized for the house.

Book it as a pre-purchase evaluation rather than a service call, and say the report is going into a negotiation. That framing gets you a written document with numbers rather than a verbal summary. Ask a local firm for one — Roman's Service HVAC or any other name on your list — and ask early, because scheduling is considerably tighter in July than in February. Build it into the inspection period rather than leaving it to the last days.

The report is useful whichever way it reads. A clean one costs you the fee and buys certainty on a five-figure component. A report finding a leaking evaporator coil on a thirteen-year-old system changes the arithmetic of the whole transaction, and it does so while you still have the leverage of an unsigned contract.

Insurance, and why HVAC is on the form

Florida property insurers commonly require a four-point inspection on older homes, typically once a house passes about thirty years, covering roof, electrical, plumbing and HVAC. The HVAC section asks the equipment's age and condition, and carriers do decline or surcharge over systems past a certain age.

This matters at exactly the wrong moment. A buyer who has budgeted for a replacement in two years can find that the insurance binder required for the mortgage will not issue until the system is dealt with. Ask your insurance agent early, before the inspection period closes, what the carrier's threshold is. It is a five-minute question that occasionally reorders the entire negotiation.

Turning a finding into a number

An HVAC report gives you three options and they are not equally good. A price reduction is the cleanest, because you control the work, the contractor and the equipment. A seller-arranged replacement before closing is faster and cheaper for you, but the seller has every incentive to buy the least expensive system that satisfies the contract, and you inherit it. A home warranty offered in place of a repair is the weakest: those policies cap payouts, exclude pre-existing conditions, and assign the contractor.

Whichever route you take, get replacement quotes rather than estimates. A written quote for a specific matched system with a permit included is a number a seller has to engage with. "Air conditioners cost a lot" is not.

The first month after you close

Some of the work belongs after the sale rather than before it, and doing it in the first month sets a baseline you will refer back to for years.

1. Change every filter and note the sizes. You do not know when the last one went in, and a loaded filter is the cheapest possible cause of a bad first impression of the system.
2. Photograph both data plates, indoor and outdoor, and store them where you can find them. Every future service call starts with those numbers.
3. Book a maintenance visit even if the pre-purchase inspection was clean, and ask for the measurements in writing. That report becomes year one of the trend line.
4. Find the drain access and the float switch, and find the emergency pan if the air handler is in an attic. Knowing where the water goes is worth knowing before it goes somewhere else.
5. Locate the disconnect by the outdoor unit and the breaker in the panel, and label them.
6. Register the warranty if the equipment is recent and registration is still open. Most manufacturers give a limited window and shorten the coverage if you miss it.

None of this takes long, and it converts an inherited system you know nothing about into one with a documented starting point. That documentation is what makes it possible, three years from now, to tell whether something has actually changed or the summer was simply hotter.

Frequently asked questions

Can the inspection be done in winter?

Cooling can be tested whenever outdoor temperatures are high enough for the equipment to run safely, which in Southwest Florida covers most of the year. On a genuinely cool day, ask that the heating side be checked instead and the cooling side revisited if conditions allow.

The seller says the unit is only five years old. Should I take that?

Verify it from the data plate and the permit record. Sellers are often repeating what they were told when they bought, which may have been wrong then.

Is a new system a reason to pay more for the house?

It removes a known expense from your first few years, which has real value. Confirm it was permitted and that the warranty transfers, because an unpermitted installation by an unlicensed installer is worth considerably less than it appears.

What about the ductwork?

Frequently the larger problem and rarely inspected. Ducts in an unconditioned attic that leak significantly waste conditioned air into a space well above 120 °F in summer. Ask whether the evaluation includes duct condition, because it is not always part of the standard scope.

Current as of September 2026. Insurance requirements vary by carrier; confirm with your agent.