HVAC in Tampa spends the long season pulling gulf humidity out of the house, not just chasing a number on the thermostat. Afternoon storms add outdoor moisture and then the sun returns and the attic goes back to being an oven around the ducts. A system that short-cycles leaves the rooms cool and clammy. A system with a crushed return never had a chance. Start with no cooling, weak cooling, or a condensate leak you can see in the ceiling.
Bayfront equipment corrodes. Inland equipment mostly dies of run time, dirty coils, and being boxed in by a hedge or a screen. Say which yard you have so nobody treats a salted fin and a dusty fin as the same failure. Algae in the drain line is ordinary here. The float switch trips, the pan overflows, and it looks like a ruined air handler when it may be a clog. Frozen coils, packed filters, and a breaker that trips are the other facts worth having before the call wanders.
If the talk turns to replacement, ask whether the indoor and outdoor pieces are matched and whether anyone looked at the ducts in that hot attic instead of copying the old size. Leaky ducts in a Tampa attic undo a careful equipment choice by pulling wet, superheated air into the system. Bigger is a guess. The load of this house, with this shade and this glass, is the question.
True heating calls are uncommon, but a heat pump that will not switch, or that blows warm in July, is still the call. A storm that soaked the condenser with wind-driven rain is not flood water that rose from the bay. Keep your policy, deductible, and any claim apart from the equipment symptom. Say what the house feels like and where the unit sits. Call the number on this page.