The condensate water is supposed to drip out the back of the window air conditioner and onto the ground below.
I’ve been trying to fix things more on my own as I get older. I go into YouTube and learn all of the details that I need to know on how to get something working again. This is how I fixed my lawn mower last month. I watched a video on how to dismantle the carburetor, clean it, and put it back together. I was so thrilled with myself when the lawn mower engine started again that it pushed me to learn the skills with all sorts of other things in my life. I ended up fixing my guitar about a week later when I remembered that the volume knob was making a lot of noise when I would roll it back and forth. I basically dismantled the control cavity of the guitar and took some contact cleaner and cleaned the knob to make sure that it was no longer making noise when the guitar was plugged into the amplifier. Just like with my lawn mower repair, my guitar repair worked immediately. But the most recent example of a DIY repair came with my window air conditioner. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working anymore and so I watched a few videos and determined that the condensate pan was clogged somehow. The condensate water is supposed to drip out the back of the window air conditioner and onto the ground below. But it has a safety switch in it that will prevent the air conditioner from turning back on if it detects water backing up inside the cooling system itself. This is to prevent a water leak that would then put water into your home. This could lead to bad water damage. After I put the air conditioner back together following the condensate line clean, everything was working again.