Shop-vac to the rescue!

So the repair guy came and basically said the evaporator coils are dirty, and eventually led to clogging the primary drain. Which of course isn’t covered by our shitty home warranty we didn’t pay for thank god. He said a coil clean, drain unclog, and new emergency drip pan (cause it has some rust) would be $370. And they couldn’t do it until monday. Yikes.
So I called another place who might be able to fix it today, but they wanted almost $700. Instead the guy on the phone was nice enough to suggest checking the drain line at the sink that it connects to. It’s probably clogged there.
So I checked, but it wasn’t clogged. I went up in the attic to investigate more. I saw there was about 3 inches of water sitting inside the coil unit. Near the drain trap there was vent pipe, so I poured some water down and it drained all the way to the bathrom. No clog there. Has to be someplace in the trap to the drain connector on the A/C.
To make a long story longer….
I did some googling and saw a suggestion to simple stick a shop-vac on the vent line and suction the crap out. Lugged the shop-vac up, stuf the hose on the drain vent and flipped the switch.
And what do you, it worked. It started sucking water to the tub, so I shut it off and the water went on down and drained into the bucket in the bathroom. Hurray! The evap. Unit is now totally drained.
The coils will still need cleaning eventually, but at least we’re safe to run the A/C with a clog-free drain line now.
Still need to check the emergency drip pan line though, cause that *should’ve* drained the backup water to outside the house, not let it overflow to the attic floor. Unless the pan itself it leaking and the water didn’t make it high enough to the drain. Woo.