Ceiling Unit Leaked After Power Outages: Pump Needed a Reset

A drip from the panel of a unit sitting above the ceiling, starting within a day of each of two building power outages. Between them the unit ran for weeks and cleared condensate exactly as it should.

Two things produce a pump that will not clear water: it has failed, or it has stopped itself. A failed pump does not recover on its own and does not correlate with anything outside the unit. A protective lockout does both, because the condition that set it is external and the state persists until something clears it. Timing separates them before a chamber is opened.

The pump has its own protective cut-off that stops the motor when it senses something abnormal, and clearing it needs one clean break in supply rather than merely the return of power. A building outage rarely gives that. Supply flickers before it settles, so the pump comes back into the same latched state it went into. Nothing is damaged and nothing has worn. It is waiting to be told to start again.

A deliberate power cycle at the pump: fully off for a moment, then on, which is the clean break the outage never delivered. That only makes sense once the chamber, float, hose and inlet have been confirmed clear, because the same symptom with sludge in it is a completely different job. Worth recording alongside it is the building's outage history, so this becomes the first thing tried next time rather than the last.