One simple setting trips up more ductless owners than anything else and every September, the calls start.
A ductless heat pump is acting up. One room won’t warm. Another blows cool air for no reason. The remote seems to have a mind of its own. The homeowner is certain something has failed.
Most of the time, nothing has. The system has just been set up wrong for the season, and it’s an easy mistake to make.
The cause is almost always the same. If your ductless system has more than one indoor head, the wall units that heat and cool individual rooms, every one of them runs off a single outdoor unit. That outdoor unit can heat, or it can cool. It can’t do both at once.
So, if you switch the living room to heat in the fall but leave the bedroom on cool from summer, you’ve asked the system to do two opposite jobs at the same time. “It won’t”.
The heads start competing, and you get exactly the odd behaviour people describe: rooms that won’t respond, air that’s the wrong temperature, a system that looks broken, “but isn’t”.
The fix takes two minutes.
When the weather turns and you want heat, set every head in the house to heat mode. Not most of them. All of them. Check the spare room, the office, the one upstairs you forget about. Come spring, do the reverse and put them all back to cooling. As long as every head agrees on the season, the system runs the way it should. While you’re going room to room, look at the filters. Lift the front cover on each head and slide out the mesh screens behind it. If they’re grey, rinse them, let them dry completely, and put them back. Once every three months is a good habit. more often with pets or a dusty house.
A clogged filter is the other thing we’re called about constantly. Air can’t get through a screen packed solid with dust, and the system slowly starves. The switch-over and the filters take a few minutes and a free afternoon. The rest, coils, refrigerant, the electrical work needs tools and training, most people don’t keep in the garage, and fall is the easy time to have someone in, before the first cold snap has everyone calling at once.
Get it right and come September you won’t be one of the calls.
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