Fascinating thread this. I have been an electronics engineer in the telecomms industry for 30 years, working in research & development labs, installing state of the art stuff underground, on the ground and in the air. With the demise of telecomms as an industry I saw pay rates dropping to new...
Given that you are low on funds but good at electrics, I would have thought you could just get a frost thermostat sensor, connect it via a relay to the power input of the a/c unit so that it just switches off when the outside coil frosts, and then back on when the outside coil melts again.
I can only offer my own experience to confirm that you are doing valuable work. Last week I parked my van on a road. It had been raining for three days. In the morning I went to go out in the van and it had been swept across the road and into a wall by a big mud slide. Now it is wrecked, I...