Most people never think about their air conditioner until the day it stops blowing cold.
A working AC is invisible
It hums in a closet or sits in a side yard, doing its job in silence, right up until a July afternoon when the house starts to feel like the inside of a parked car. For decades, the deal homeowners made with that machine was simple enough. You paid for it once, you paid a technician to keep it alive, and the math behind those bills stayed relatively boring.
The hardware is mostly metal, steel, aluminum and copper, and a lot of it is built in Mexico, which ships more cooling and heating equipment to the United States than any other country. Prices crept up with inflation and refrigerant rules, but they rarely lurched. That quiet arrangement just changed.