Your heat pump is a fantastic feat of engineering. It heats! It cools! It saves you energy! But, of course, even technological marvels encounter a problem now and then. And if your heat pump is struggling, you need to sort that out right away.
Why is it so important to repair your heat pump as promptly as possible? What could happen if you delay heat pump repairs? We’ll explain it all.
If you’ve had a heat pump for quite a while and it’s still chugging along just fine, you might not be thinking much about replacing it just yet. After all, a replacement could be costly, and why would you do that if it’s not absolutely necessary?
Alternately, perhaps you’ve got an air conditioner, and you like the idea of replacing it with a heat pump and cutting your heating costs by using it to warm your home as well as cool it, but you weren’t planning on investing in a heat pump right now. Is there any reason why now would be the ideal time to get a new heat pump? Actually, yes, there are some very good reasons, and we’ll tell you all about them.
Heat pumps are an efficient and eco-friendly heating and cooling solution for many homes in Slidell, LA. They provide both warmth during the winter months and cooling relief in the summer.
To get the best performance and extend the lifespan of your heat pump, regular maintenance is important. Let’s take a look at the importance of heat pump services for your heat pump and discuss important areas of maintenance that you can perform to keep it running smoothly for years to come.
There are some heat pump repairs that can wait and some that need to be addressed immediately. Short cycling is one of those issues that warrants a call to a professional HVAC company as soon as you’re aware of it.
Short cycling increases wear and tear on your heat pump and can take years away from its estimated lifespan. When you call us for heat pump repair in St. Bernard, LA ASAP, you’ll prevent that added wear and tear.
Short cycling can be attributed to a number of different issues. Keep reading to learn how to identify short cycling and why you should have fixed it before it causes a major disruption to your home comfort.
You may have decided that your old air conditioning system has just gone through its last summer of cooling your home. Time to replace it. But replace it with what?
You might automatically think, “With another air conditioning system, of course.” But this isn’t your only option. You might find that putting in a heat pump is a much better choice than going with a standard air conditioning system.
Recently we posted our seasonal reminder about air conditioning maintenance. This is an essential service if you want to get the most efficient, effective, and reliable performance from your home’s AC over the summer. Maintenance is a great investment that pays you back in many ways, and it’s probably the most important service you can have scheduled for it.
But what if you have a heat pump? Are its maintenance requirements different from an air conditioner? Yes, they are—and we’re glad you asked. You need to schedule maintenance for your heat pump this spring to help it help you through the summer. But you also need to schedule another maintenance appointment for it in the fall.
You may already know the big answer to this question: a heat pump operates like an air conditioner, except it can change the direction it moves heat so it can work as a heating system as well. This makes a heat pump an excellent two-in-one option for homeowners looking to change out their standard furnace/air conditioner combo.
But we plan to go deeper into the heat pump differences in this post. We’ll examine three parts in a heat pump that help it work as both a heating and cooling system. In most ways, a heat pump resembles an air conditioner, with two sets of refrigerant coils, a compressor, an expansion valve, an indoor blower fan, and an outdoor exhaust fan. The following three components are only in heat pumps and are critical for allowing them to work the way they do.
Heat pumps offer several major benefits as home comfort systems, but the biggest one is that heat pumps operate as both air conditioners and heaters. They aren’t two systems packaged into one: they use the same set of components to deliver heating or cooling to a house.
The easiest way to think of how a heat pump works is to visualize a standard central air conditioner. An AC circulates refrigerant between two sets of coils, indoors and outdoors. The indoor coil removes heat from the air, cooling it, and then the outdoor coil releases the heat. A heat pump works the same way—it’s a refrigerant-based system and from the outside looks identical to a central AC—except it can reverse the flow of refrigerant, and this causes the two coils to swap roles. Now the exterior coil absorbs heat and the indoor coil releases it. Presto! An AC becomes a heater.
But here’s the big question: is this system enough to handle our weather? Is a heat pump installation in Kenner, LA a viable choice for you?
When the weather cools down, homeowners will turn off their air conditioning systems and begin to fire up their heaters. But you’re in a different situation: you have a heat pump for your house, which means you’ll continue to use it through the coming season, but you’ll switch it over to heating mode. This causes the heat pump to “run backwards,” so that instead of removing heat from the house and exhausting it outside, it will remove heat from outside and send it into the house.
Well, this is how it’s supposed to go. You may run into a problem during the first day of cold weather when you try to change the heat pump into heating mode. If you’re only getting room temperature air from the vents, or you’re getting cold air, you may need to call us for heat pump repair in Gretna, LA.
We’ll dive into this problem below and see what might have happened to your heat pump.
Let’s talk about the heat pump. If you aren’t familiar with the heat pump as an HVAC option, here’s the lowdown:
A heat pump is similar to an air conditioner. It uses electricity to power a compressor that places refrigerant under pressure. The refrigerant circulates between two sets of coils, indoors and outdoors. Hot refrigerant moving from the compressor first releases heat by condensing in one set of coils, then the cold refrigerant absorbs heat by evaporating in the other set of coils. What’s different with a heat pump is that it can reverse the way it circulates refrigerant. An AC can only move refrigerant so it absorbs heat from the indoor coils and releases heat through the outdoor coils. A heat pump can switch this process, bringing heat from the outside indoors. This means it’s a heating and cooling system in one.
