The heat pump is a hard-working comfort appliance. It puts in more work than a standard air conditioner or a furnace because a heat pump runs in both winter and summer. When it’s cold, a heat pump draws heat from the outside to warm the house. When it’s hot, a heat pump draws heat from out of the house to cool it. It uses the same components no matter if it’s in heating or cooling mode, so these parts can wear down rapidly over the years—twice as fast as an AC or a furnace.
The best way to keep a heat pump from succumbing to all this strain is to schedule maintenance twice a year, in spring and fall. Nothing can prevent every potential problem with a heat pump, however. We’re going to look at some of the more common troubles a heat pump may run into that will require calling experts to repair it.
A furnace generates heat, either using gas burners or electrical heating elements, to warm up the air, then uses a blower to send the heated air into the ductwork of a home. As with any heat-generating appliance, there’s some potential for a fire hazard, although this is rare for modern furnaces. However, if you ever notice an acrid burning odor coming from the vents when your home’s furnace is running, it can be alarming.
We’re proud to call ourselves “The Doctor of Home Comfort” for the area. Part of maintaining comfort for local homeowners now involves installing excellent whole-house generators from Honeywell. (We also install them for commercial buildings.) With 
“What, another thing I need to get cleaned regularly?” We know that keeping track of various maintenance tasks for a house can feel daunting, but duct cleaning is actually one that’s easy to have scheduled and completed. You don’t need it done every year, but it’s worth arranging for every 3 to 5 years. So if you’ve never had air duct cleaning done for your home before, you’re probably overdue for it.
If you looked up the word refrigerant in a dictionary, you’d probably come across a definition like this:
You’ve had your current air conditioner for more than ten years. Maybe more than fifteen or twenty. It’s just not working as well as it used to, or it’s started to run up astronomical bills each summer. Maybe it’s breaking down frequently and needs repair to keep it hobbling on. Or you might feel it’s time to retire it before all of those things start happening.
Spring cleaning covers more than just sweeping up dust in a house after the winter is over. One vital cleaning job you should consider scheduling this spring if you haven’t had it done for a number of years is air duct cleaning. A clean ventilation system improves the performance of your air conditioning system (and your heater as well when it gets back to work in fall), lowers the amount of dust inside the system that can cause repair needs, and prevents steep drops in energy efficiency.
Winter officially ends this week, and we hope you already have plans for your air conditioning maintenance. Early spring is the best time to do it!
It’s 2018, and if you own and operate a restaurant or commercial kitchen, you’re probably already making your budget plans for the year. Equipment is a big part of your annual budget, so you want to make sure you work with a restaurant equipment installation company who can help you find the best and most energy-efficient new installations.
It’s October and people are already planning Halloween parties and costumes. And, if they want to be prepared for the change in the weather, they should also be planning for maintenance for their heating systems. In our last post we put up a friendly reminder for homeowners who have heat pumps that they 
