Electrical – Please help! We have an air conditioning and breaker issue

You are missing something. Either you have not found the correct breaker yet, or the breaker is not inside the breaker panel for your house.

Walk through each breaker in the breaker planel for your house. You could have a mislabled breaker. (The breaker you are looking for is likely a two-pole 240V breaker, maybe 30 amps or better.)

Since this is a central cooling unit, it might be powered from its own breaker box. Follow the electrical supply wires (cable) back from the unit. Where does it go? You might find another breaker box dedicated to the cooling unit alone. There might also be a breaker in your meter box protecting the unit in addition to the main breaker for your house.

First, I feel your pain. I'm in Houston at my girlfriend's place; we live in a single family house, and the A/C is running all day even with the thermostat at 84 degrees. I work from home, so I can't let it go up higher than that. Our outside thermometer recorded 106 degrees today.

The things that we've added to the house to help keep cool, besides new insulation and having the A/C unit checked, include a bunch of things. First, a little theory. Your apartment heats up because of the sun heating the building primarily, and secondarily because of infiltration from the outside of warm air.

I'm going to just assume that your landlord isn't willing to replace your windows and doors with low-E dual-paned units. I've done this to my house in Bryan, TX and it literally cut my utility bill in half.

The first thing we did with her place, where the landlord is also not willing to rip out a ton of windows and replace them, was to get blinds with reflective shades in all of the windows, and external solar shades or screens where possible. Remember: Black stuff is OK on the outside of the structure, because black absorbs heat (and you don't care about the heat if it's on the outside) -- and white things on the inside of the structure, because you want the heat to not be absorbed and to just be reflected back out.

The second thing we did was to get a better thermostat for the house. The old one was a manual one with mercury in it; the new one has a digital timer and a bunch of other features that include breaks for things like the compressor coils to defrost.

The third thing we did was start replacing the A/C filter frequently... at least once a month.

It might help to suggest more if we knew what kind of A/C unit you have (is it one of those high-rise below-window units, or a 'real' one with a compressor and air exchanger in a closet or attic?), and what kind of structure (concrete or wood frame) you're in.