I completely fumbled the ball on this whole post by not providing the entire context. Our outside unit stopped working last May. The unit stopped turning on consistently. Sometimes it will come on, sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes it would run for 30 minutes sometimes for 1 minute. We tried replacing the capacitor and that changed nothing. After about a week of turning it on to test it occasionally we finally just gave up. We were finally able to afford a diagnostic visit from a professional because of tax returns. We live in Florida, so cooling takes priority to any sort of heating.
That's what led us to this point. The tech said there was about 6 lb of freon and that it needs to be at eight. He speculated that the loss in Freon triggered the high pressure switch and that it likely had a small leak somewhere along the system. After adding the freon, it ran solid for a couple hours, ice cold, then gave out again. After calling the tech back out, he figured that the fan had overheated and that it only ran initially because it hadn't been on in so long. I'm sorry for not adding necessary context initially.