Two years ago I bought a small house in Tennessee with a non-running heat pump. The first technician said, "Yeah, it's not running, low on gas. It will cost $400 in gas to fire it up for a test." The compressor would operate, the blower would run. Older mercury type thermostat, simple operating system. I called another company, and the owner/salesman came out, took one look at my unit from the porch and said, "Yeah, you need a new heat pump" Winter was coming, and I didn't want to live in a new place with a maybe heating system, not knowing how quickly I could get service once winter has set in. The house had no backup heating system. So I purchased a new $6000 Goodman heat pump. The Bryant would have cost $7000. No experience in this equipment, only had oil or gas heat before, and separate air conditioners. The unit runs fine for two years, and then gets moody this year. The digital thermostat shows "thermostat not communicating with heat pump", "outside temperature sensor not connected", "auxiliary heat on", and such. I call the supplier, and the mechanic says the blower motor has failed, all my fault for not changing filters often enough, and closing off the basement filter intake. I wasn't using the basement for sleeping, so I closed off the filter. The upstairs filter was easily visible in the hall, and I cleaned or replaced it regularly. None the less, for a $400 installation fee he replaced the warranted blower motor. He could not figure out the cause of the error messages. He would reset the system and go away, billing me for a service call. After a further $400 in service calls to reset the system, he still could not find the cause of the error messages. I went online and learned how to reset the system myself, simply turn the breaker off for five minutes, no magic there. I proceeded to observe the system, and soon found out that the outside sensor was not firmly plugged into the board. Once fully plugged in, the sensor error messages ended. Still the unit would go to auxiliary heat and refuse to use the heat pump. I noticed that sometimes when I removed the outside cover on the heat pump it would run for a while. Seemed like a loose wire somewhere. To tidy up the outside board and control area, I started to remove an un-used harness stuffed behind the control board. Suddenly, the unit started running, little LEDs on the board all going to 'OK' mode. AHA. Looking closely, a large wire from a large cap above the board was right there, plugged into a terminal on the board. I removed the harness, and carefully jiggled the large connector. I didn't seem loose. I pressed it fully onto the board, and the system has been running fine for a week now, cycling between heat pump and aux heat as the temp cycles above and below 35 degrees, my control point. To get to the rant, I believe today's average heat pump technicians are not trained and educated enough to service these new artificial intelligence systems. The system refers to itself as 'adaptive intelligence' to set the blower fan speed and operate the thermostat. Way above the average guy working for an air conditioner company. When I was servicing apartment air conditioner systems it was a fairly straight forward setup of relays and contactors. The most sophisticated part might be the anticipator setting, and understanding how to set it. I expect the average repairman seeing a board with a microprocessor on it with chips, miniaturization,and printed circuits is overwhelmed. I got lucky and finally found a loose wire. The intelligent thermostat could not diagnose a loose wire. Searching online I see many customers having to replace boards, even whole systems to sort out these over-complicated heat pumps. If I knew then what I know now, I would have stayed with the older, simpler to operate system. The coils on the old system were still clean, and everything was in running condition, just low on gas.
2
Heat Pump Rant
Re: Heat pump rant
Good Answers:
"Almost" Good Answers: