HVAC in Jacksonville has to cool a heavy summer and heat a morning that south Florida would laugh at. Heat pumps are the usual machine, and on a hard freeze the auxiliary heat is not a rumor. If the house is cold and the outdoor unit is a block of ice, or the air is barely warm, that is a real call here. If the house is hot and clammy in August, that is the other real call. Start by saying which season is winning.
At the beaches, salt works on the condenser the way it does in any ocean town: fins, lugs, and the disconnect. Inland, the equipment dies of run time, dirty coils, and attic or crawl-space installations that nobody wants to visit. Condensate lines still clog in the humid months and overflow while you are thinking about heating. Filters, frozen coils, and a heat pump stuck in the wrong mode are the facts to have ready. A system that cooled fine and will not heat is not the same failure as a system that does neither.
Replacement should match a house that needs both seasons. Ask whether the indoor and outdoor equipment are a pair, whether ducts in a hot attic or a damp crawl are being reused blindly, and whether anyone sized the load for both the August afternoon and the cold morning. Copying an old cooling-only habit leaves the winter call waiting. Say if you have strips, a furnace, or you do not know. Not knowing is allowed. Pretending the winter is imaginary is not.
A coastal storm that soaked the equipment is a different sentence from river water that rose into the crawl space and drowned a duct. Keep the policy, the deductible, and any claim beside the repair, not mixed into it. Describe the symptom in the season you are actually having. Call the number on this page.