Nothing Air Conditioning is free. Heat pumps provide both Heating and Cooling.

With routine maintenance all residential equipment should last ten to fifteen years. Without maintenance five to eight years. Keep in mind the average time a furnace runs in heating is about three to four hours a day (Roughly about 600-700 hours a year). Compare this to an average of 2 hours a day spent in your car (equals about 538 hours a year not including driving on the weekends). Would you go a year without changing the oil in your car? If so, would you keep that same car for ten years and have done no maintenance on the car?

Permits protect you as a homeowner and us as a company. If a job is not permitted, how do you as a homeowner know everything was done safely? If you go to sell your home and not everything was done to code will you get the company to return to fix the issues and cover the cost?

Yes and no. If you use the thermostat to set the temperature back with preset times and temperatures it can save you in run times and usage. If you keep your house at a constant temperature it will not.

First ask your builder for the company’s information who installed the heating system. Then ask for the home load calculation and room by room duct sizing information as it pertains to your house and its design. If this work is done correctly the problem should not exist. We and other companies who try to compete in the new housing markets provide this information and do this on all new construction projects. We have to charge more for this and for the journeymen installer doing the work. If the builder doesn’t have this information, call us or another reputable company and have them do a load calculation and duct sizing for the home. The cost for this varies from company to company.

You have a leak in the system somewhere. Once the system is installed properly and started up for the first time, we should never need to add Freon to a system. In fact if a leak does occur it needs to be found and fixed. Not doing so can be unnecessarily expensive as you incur the cost of additional Freon and the operating cost of the unit running all the time. It is also illegal to willingly adding Freon to a system without repairing the leak and a fine of up to $20,000.00 can be levied by the EPA.

The defrost cycle is running. Heat pumps in the winter extract heat from outside and convert it to heat in the inside of your home. In doing this the outdoor coil frosts up after long run times or unusually cold mornings. This frost needs to be cleared so the unit can continue to move air outside through the coil. So we have a defrost cycle which turns the air conditioner on in the house. The heat pump extracts heat from inside the home and sends it to the outdoor unit to clear the ice. This is why sometimes people here a swooshing sound outside by the heat pump, and see steam coming from the heat pump. The whole cycle takes about 3-5 minutes. When this cycle occurs the backup or emergency heat comes on. This tempers the cold air out of the vents. If you see a problem with ice building up on your heat pump and not going away, shut the unit off and put your thermostat on emergency heat until a technician can look at the unit.