Propane or electric heat pump

[jwstewar]

Woke up this morning about 3 AM and thought the house felt cold. Went and while doing my business I heard a funny humming sound. Walking to the kitchen to get a drink of water (the other part of my nightly ritchual [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] ) I still heard the hum and it was louder and smelled something burning. Walking toward the utility room the smell got stronger and the sound louder. It was coming from the furnace. I could tell from the sound that the motor was locked up. I then immediately went to the thermostat and shut it down and also cut the power. Woke the wife up and told her to keep our daughter close to her to keep her warm and I would do the same with our son. Got up about 5:30 (close to normal time) and called in to work and told them I was going to work from home today. Called the company that put the new heat pump in to come do the repair. They discovered that when the original heat pump was put in they didn't upgrade the fan motor like they should've. It was only a 1/4 HP motor. He said he would go ahead and upgrade to 1/2. When he came back he said he couldn't get a 1/2 and a bracket that would fit in our fan housing and he couldn't find another fan housing to fit our furnace - at leat in a timely manner i.e. today. He was able to get a 1/3 HP that also spun at a higher rate than the old one. Made a difference in our son's and daughter's rooms at the other end of the house. Didn't think it was too bad of cost to fix it. $105 for the motor, $12 for a bracket, $8 for a capacitor, and 1 hour ($68) labor. All told about $217. Could've probably done it myself, but wasn't totally sure it was just the motor and didn't want to get in above my head - I just needed heat quick. All in all, what started out to be a terrible situation, didn't turn out too bad.

[Pat]

jwstewar, You did the prudent thing! Whether or not you could have done it yourself is not a viable consideratioin given the stakes. Could the family survive a day or two without heat? Most likely but why? There are times when even my avid DIY motivation has to be put aside for a reality check.

Oh, by the way... My TOP OF THE LINE heat pump new out of the box had a bad blower motor on the outside unit. Bearings made funny noises and retarded the fan speed. The head tech weenie of the HVAC outfit was ready to run away and join the circus as it seems earlier in the week two of the new units he installed failed within 24 hours (mine was the third but a different brand.) None of it his fault and all to be replaced under warranty but these things don't build customer satisfaction and it wastes a lot of tech time.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[jwstewar]

OK, I'm getting tired of "playing" with the furnace. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] Yesterday I noticed the house was cold (it was about 35 outside). The unit wasn't trying to run the furnace but was trying to run the outside unit. It wasn't running the fan on the outside unit. [img]/forums/images/icons/frown.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/mad.gif[/img] Kicked it over to emergency heat and I'll call the company again tomorrow. This is the first "problem" with the new unit that wasn't an install problem or a problem with the old part. Wonder if they could've damaged the outside unit when they had both units running? Darn hail storm....

[Pat]

jwstewar, One of my bigest malfunctions relating to the HVAC at the new house turned out to be a short between my headsets, aka a cockpit error. The temp dropped below the setpoint for switching from heat pump to LPG furnace. I had been heating all the regularly occupied part of the house with the geo heat pump in the basement but when I wanted to heat my office/computer room/ham radio shack (on an air to air unit) I got NO HEAT.

While I was on the phone with my HVAC guy I realized that the outside temp was below 40 and that the gas valve was shut off at the furnace.... DU-UH... Valve to O-N position, switch power off for 3 sec or so and then back on and all was OK.

Hope you get your situation sorted out soon... WINTER IS COMING.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[jwstewar]

Right now we are OK as it is running the furnace. Will have to wait for it to warm up a bit as right now it is 20 so it won't even think about running the outside unit. Tonight it is supposed to get down to 12 - I think we'll be OK. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Pat]

jwstewar, We were 19F a bit ago (11AM). In self defense I have gone around and set the "unused" zones to 40F (lowest the T-stats allow) I have three rooms that are infrequeltly used (for now) in the upstairs that have water pipes in them for sinks.

The upstairs bathroom has no thermostat but gets heat if any of the other three upstairs zones call for heat. A problem that I see is that the bathroom is several degrees colder than any of the other spaces so I am monitoring it to ensure that at least one zone will kick in and allow the bathroom to have some heat before it would get down to freezing in there. I have a back up plan which is pretty smple... just open the bathroom door and let some warm air in from the loft which with its thermostat turned off only gets down to 60 when it is 18-20F outside and we have the great room set for the low 70's.

When I get around to installing the two ceiling fans in the great room I will have more options on heat distrubutiono. Likewise for the gas log fireplace in the great room. It just needs to have the ceramic logs setup and it is ready to fire up. I suspect that the looks of its fire and its radiant output will be a nice effect in the great room. I suspect the majority of its convection heating component will go right up and heat the loft rather than add to the heat on the ground floor.

I should have most of my experimenting done in a month or two and be ready for spring by about the first week of Feb. Unfortunatley spring's arrival may be delayed beyond that.

Do you have any form of backup heat in the house beyond the kitchen range? We are subject to electrical outage so I was some paranoid about having propane backup that didn't require regular electric power. I opted for milivolt self generating pilot/thermostat type propane heaters with pizoelectric ignition.

[img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img] Pat [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[jwstewar]

</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
Do you have any form of backup heat in the house beyond the kitchen range? We are subject to electrical outage so I was some paranoid about having propane backup that didn't require regular electric power.

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Don't even have that. Our stove is electric. I've been thinking about different options we can do. We hope to either move or build a house on our existing property (and move the doublewide out that we currently live in) in the next couple of years or less [img]/forums/images/icons/laugh.gif[/img] . If we build it will be wired for a back-up generator. In the mean time, I've been thinking about buying at least a kerosene type heater. Wouldn't necessarily want to go to sleep there with it on, but maybe we could start it, take the chill out and then shut it down for awhile. Don't know, it is one of the few areas that I'm not real sure on my "level of defense." [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img] We were fortunate last year, when there was a big ice storm around Christmas a lot of folks (if I remember correctly around a million) around southern and central Ohio were w/o power. Including a lot in Columbus and Chillicothe proper (we are about 8 miles out). Our power didn't even flicker. I know some that were out for 2 or 3 weeks.