Heat Pump Service in Austin & San Antonio

For most homes, yes, and especially for all-electric homes. A heat pump is at its best in a climate with a long cooling season and a mild winter, which describes Austin and San Antonio well. In summer it performs exactly like a central air conditioner. In winter it heats efficiently on the great majority of our days, and electric backup strips cover the handful of nights that drop well below freezing. If your house already has a gas furnace in good shape, the math is different: a straight AC paired with that furnace, or a heat pump set up as a dual-fuel system with the furnace as backup, may be the better fit. We will look at your house and your utility situation and tell you which.

First, know what normal is. Heat pump supply air is typically in the 85 to 95 degree range, which feels lukewarm against your skin compared to a gas furnace, even though it is warming the house fine. Second, the system runs a defrost cycle on cold, damp mornings, during which it briefly switches to cooling mode to melt frost off the outdoor coil; the backup strips should cover that gap. If the air is genuinely cool for more than a few minutes, or the house is losing ground, the likely causes are a low refrigerant charge, a reversing valve stuck in cooling, a failed defrost board or outdoor sensor, or backup strips that are not coming on. Those need a technician.

Both refer to the electric resistance strips inside your air handler. “Aux” (auxiliary) heat comes on automatically when the heat pump cannot keep up on its own, usually on very cold mornings or when you raise the setpoint several degrees at once. That is normal, and it should switch off once the heat pump catches up. “Emergency heat” is a manual setting that shuts the heat pump off entirely and runs only the strips. It is meant for when the outdoor unit has failed and you are waiting on a repair. Leaving it on by mistake, or having a thermostat wired to call for strips too early, is one of the most common reasons we see for a winter electric bill that suddenly doubled.

A heat pump keeps producing heat well below freezing, though with less capacity as the temperature falls, and the backup strips make up the difference. On a normal Central Texas cold snap that is more than enough. What February 2021 taught everyone is that no system heats a house without electricity: heat pumps, electric furnaces and gas furnaces all need power for the blower and controls. If a long outage is your concern, the honest answer is that it is a power question more than an equipment question. What we can do is make sure your defrost controls and backup strips are working before winter, so that when the power is on, the house is warm.

Ten to fifteen years is a reasonable expectation in Central Texas, with maintenance being the biggest variable. A heat pump runs year-round, so it accumulates hours faster than a straight air conditioner that sits idle every winter, and our summers already put more hours on cooling equipment than most of the country. Two tune-ups a year, one before cooling season and one before heating season, are what keep a system at the far end of that range. Care Club schedules both for $9.99 a month. When a compressor fails on a unit past its twelfth year, we will usually show you the replacement number next to the repair, because at that point it is often the smarter spend.