Heat Pump Repair, Replacement & Installation

A heat pump is one machine doing two jobs. In summer it moves heat out of your house; in winter it runs in reverse and moves heat in. That is why it suits our climate so well — the Triangle has a long, humid cooling season and winters mild enough that a heat pump carries the heating load efficiently for most of the year.

Why your heat pump blows cool air in winter

This is the single most common call we get in January, and it is usually not a fault. A heat pump delivers air at a lower temperature than a gas furnace does — comfortable, but cooler than your hand expects. The house still reaches temperature; it just takes a steadier, longer run to get there.

What is worth investigating is an outdoor unit that ices over and never clears. Heat pumps are designed to frost up and then run a defrost cycle to shed it. If the ice stays, the fault is normally the defrost control, a sensor, or the reversing valve, not the whole system.

Auxiliary heat, and the bills that follow it

Most heat pumps here have electric backup heat strips for the coldest hours. They work, and they are expensive to run. If your auxiliary heat is coming on constantly in mild weather, something is wrong — a low charge, a stuck sensor, a thermostat configured badly, or a system too small for the house. That is worth diagnosing, because it shows up directly on your power bill.

Repair or replace

Age, the specific failure, and the repair history all matter. A capacitor or a contactor on an eight-year-old unit is an easy call. A failed compressor on a fifteen-year-old system usually is not worth it. Where a refrigerant leak is involved, the age of the equipment and the refrigerant it uses change the maths considerably, and we will explain that rather than just quoting a recharge that will leak away again.

Sizing, if you are replacing

Bigger is not better. An oversized heat pump short-cycles, which removes less humidity in summer and wears components faster. We size from the actual house — square footage, ceiling heights, window exposure, insulation, and duct condition — rather than copying the label on the unit being removed. In older Chapel Hill homes with no ductwork, ductless mini-splits are heat pumps too, and often the better answer.

Omar and Ryan handle our heat pump work and hold NATE certification. If your property also has an irrigation or pool backflow assembly due for testing, Mohammed can cover that on the same visit — we run both trades.