John,

Good you got that gap below the vertical fins as that should allow you to do the brush cleaning thing. Also, from zooming in on one of you earlier pictures showing the vertical fins it looks like you have two (maybe 3) little levers you use to adjust the direction of the air flow and those levers are set in the middle right now. My York units don't have those levers attached to the vertical fins; instead, you just reach in and move/adjust the fins with your fingers.

And my experience shows that a dirty squirrel cage fan/blower can really cut down on the amount of air blown from the evap/inside unit...and when less air is being blown from the unit that means less air is being pulled through the cooling fins/coils which results in an air con that don't cool as well as it should and you end up using more electricity as this causes the compressor/outside unit to run longer, setting the A/C to a lower temp setting that you had to do before when it was clean, etc. Basically a domino effect is caused that ultimately impacts the pocketbook.

The outside/compressor unit is the real energy hog when it runs....when I was having my earlier problems with the 18K BTU unit I talked about in my opening post I did quite a few clamp-on ammeter measurements before and after cleaning of the compressor unit. Now, after cleaning and the unit working normally again, the system's combined operating current is approx. 8.6 amps (i.e., inside evap unit and outside compressor unit), but when only the evap/inside unit is running (like you have it to Fan Mode Only or it has cooled down the room to the set temp and the compressor unit has cut off for a few minutes) the evap/inside unit is only pulling 0.3 amps (about the same as a typical fan)....but when the compressor unit kicks back in the total system amperage draw jumps back up to around 8.6 amps....so in this case the total system amperage consisted of 0.3A for the evap unit and 8.3A for the compressor unit.

Pib

Good suggestion about using a bleach mixture on the drain line.

My service guys just use their electric water blower and place the tip of it at the entrance to the drain pipe.

But I can see how using the bleach mixture instead of plain water would help keep the line clear more effectively.

On my Daikin unit, as Pib described, the drain pipe entry point is at the far right and lower corner of the unit, when you're facing it. Same general area as the motor and circuit board components.

John,

Good you got that gap below the vertical fins as that should allow you to do the brush cleaning thing. Also, from zooming in on one of you earlier pictures showing the vertical fins it looks like you have two (maybe 3) little levers you use to adjust the direction of the air flow and those levers are set in the middle right now. My York units don't have those levers attached to the vertical fins; instead, you just reach in and move/adjust the fins with your fingers.

Pib

Yep, my small bedroom unit has two sections of those directional fins, one group on the right side and another group on the left. When you move either piece, the whole attached group of 6 or so fins move with them. But the main thing is, those fins are very flexible, so it would be easy to slide a brush underneath them without worrying about breaking them or causing some other problem.