Granite Shoals Heat Pumps, Sorted Out for Lake Winters.
Houses in Granite Shoals sit close enough to Lake LBJ that the weather gets to the equipment before it gets to the porch. When a winter front funnels down the lake valleys, a heat pump that coasted through fall suddenly has real work to do, and whatever was wrong with it shows up that night. We drive over from Burnet through Marble Falls, find the actual fault with instruments, and tell you the fix and the price before any work starts.
Winter
The Heating Side Wakes Up in January
A heat pump in this town leads two lives. Most of the year it runs as an air conditioner, and nobody gives the heating side a thought. Then a front drops down the valley, the thermostat calls for heat, and the reversing valve and defrost controls get asked to do jobs they have not done since last winter. That first cold night is when our phone starts ringing.
Damp air makes the winter side harder. Close to the water, frost builds on the outdoor coil quickly on a cold morning, so the unit has to melt it off more often. A defrost board that misreads the coil, or a sensor that has drifted, leaves the unit either icing over or defrosting when it has no reason to. The house cools off either way, and the electric bill climbs.
Melt water is the part people miss. Every defrost sends water running down the coil, and if the base pan cannot shed it, that water refreezes the moment the unit goes back to heating. Ice then climbs from the bottom rows up, cycle after cycle, until the fan blade starts striking it. A unit sitting low in a soggy corner of the yard gives us far more of these calls than one set level on a clean pad with open ground under it.
So the diagnosis covers the machine and the spot it lives in, along with the house it serves, whether that is a cottage that grew rooms or a newer build with young equipment.
Outdoors
What the Outdoor Unit Tells Us
Six things get checked on a heat pump call, and you hear what each one showed in plain English.
Defrost, watched while it runs
We force a defrost and stay with it. The coil should clear, the fan should restart, and the unit should drop back into heat without hanging halfway.
Coil sensor and defrost board
A drifted sensor makes the board guess. Its reading gets held against the real coil temperature, which separates a unit that ices over from one that defrosts too often.
Reversing valve and solenoid
The valve flips the system from cooling to heating. A sticking valve or a dead solenoid coil is how a house ends up with cool air coming out of the vents in January.
Backup strips and sequencer
Strips should help in deep cold and during defrost, then drop out. An amp reading on each one shows whether it works, sticks on, or never engages at all.
Outdoor coil fins and cabinet
Lake air corrodes outdoor units years ahead of inland ones. The coil face, the fins, and the cabinet base get inspected for damage that cuts heating capacity.
Charge, read in heating mode
Heat mode pressures read differently than summer ones. A short charge means a leak somewhere, and a leak on a heat pump usually hurts both seasons.
Cold Air From the Vents Tonight?
A person answers around the clock. Tell us what the thermostat reads and what the outdoor unit is doing, and a truck gets lined up.
Backup Heat That Runs When It Should Not
The winter complaint we hear most often comes from a warm house with an electric bill nobody can explain. More often than not, the backup heat is behind it.
The electric strips in the air handler are there to help. They should kick in during a defrost, when a hard front pushes the outdoor temperature past what the heat pump can keep up with, or when someone switches to emergency heat. Everything else should come from the heat pump itself. When the strips run all day, something has gone wrong.
Sometimes a sequencer welds closed and keeps a strip energized around the clock. Sometimes the thermostat was wired or set up so it calls for auxiliary heat every time the house slips a degree. And sometimes the heat pump is failing quietly, low on charge or stuck in defrost, so the strips carry the whole load while the outdoor unit looks like it is running fine.
Each of those gets fixed differently, and guessing wrong is how people pay for parts they never needed. We clamp a meter on each strip, read the outdoor side, and go through the thermostat setup before naming a cause.
Sometimes the trail leads outside and up a ladder, to where the line set climbs the siding and enters the wall. A chafed line or a weeping connection up there slowly starves the heat pump, and the strips quietly pick up the slack. The repair gets made where the fault actually is, then checked with the system running.
An aux light that glows more than it rests is worth a phone call to (512) 925-3090. The same goes for strips clicking on in mild weather, and the contact page takes the details if typing suits you better.
Diamond Contractor
Mitsubishi Diamond Contractor for ductless systems.
Second Generation
A family trade, with ten years on the tools.
Owner on the Truck
The owner is the one working on your heat pump.
Open 24 Hours
Cold nights included, a person picks up.
The Rooms a Heat Pump Never Reached
Some rooms in town have never once been warm in January. They went up after the heat pump did, and the duct feeding them was tacked onto the end of a run already doing all it could. By the time air reaches that far register it has shed most of its heat, and the room stays cold no matter where the thermostat sits.
No repair on the main unit fixes a room it cannot reach, and when we find that, we say so. Sometimes correcting a duct run solves it. Often the cleaner answer is a ductless head in the addition, run as its own zone, so the older system stops straining to push air down a run that was never going to carry it. The heads we hang are Mitsubishi, and we install them as a Diamond Contractor.
Outdoor units near the water deserve their own mention. The humidity that makes lake evenings damp also works on coil fins and cabinet metal, and a unit on a lot near the shore ages faster than the same model farther inland. Some of that damage can be repaired. Some of it means the coil has lost enough surface that the unit will never heat well again, and you hear that plainly, with the options laid out.
Weekend places get one more piece of advice: a connected thermostat with freeze alerts tells you the heat quit while you are still at home in the city. Photos of recent work are in our gallery.
Heat Pump Questions From the Lake Streets
What Granite Shoals owners ask once the heating side starts acting up.
How often should a heat pump go into defrost?
There is no fixed number. Frost forms fastest when the air is damp and hovering near freezing, which describes a lot of mornings by the lake, so defrost runs more here than on a dry, bitter day. What we judge is the pattern: how long each cycle lasts, whether the rooms lose ground during it, and whether the melt water drains away.
The aux heat light stays on. Is something broken?
Possibly. Backup strips are supposed to help during defrost and hard cold, then shut off. When they stay on, the usual causes are a stuck sequencer, a thermostat set up to call for auxiliary heat too eagerly, or a heat pump that has lost capacity and cannot keep up alone. Each gets measured before anything is replaced.
Our cottage addition never warms up. Can the heat pump be made to reach it?
Sometimes a duct correction does it, especially where a run was crushed or tacked on when a room was added. When the addition sits too far from the system, or the ducts cannot carry enough air, a ductless head in that room is usually the better answer. You get both options explained, with prices, before choosing either one.
We are only at the lake on weekends. How would we know the heat quit?
A connected thermostat with freeze alerts will tell you the house is losing heat while you are away. If an alert comes in, call us at any hour and tell us what it says. The visit can be timed around your arrival or around whoever can let us in, so nobody waits in a cold house.
Is an outdoor unit with corroded fins worth repairing?
That depends on how much coil is left. Light fin damage can often be straightened and cleaned, and the unit keeps heating well. When lake air has eaten through enough of the coil surface, capacity drops and repairs stop paying for themselves. We show you what we found, give you the repair price, and tell you honestly if replacement makes more sense.
If the trouble turns out to be on the cooling side, a regular AC repair visit takes it, and a night with no heat at all goes to the after-hours emergency line. Twice-a-year upkeep keeps both seasons on a schedule, and a system past saving is a job for HVAC installation in Granite Shoals. For the wider picture, read about heat pump repair across the county, ductless mini splits for rooms the ducts never reached, and the rest of our work in town.
Have the Heat Pump Looked At
The next front will find whatever is wrong with the heating side. Better that a free look finds it first, on a mild afternoon, with time to order a part. Whoever answers will want two things: the thermostat reading and what the outdoor unit is doing. Those can also go through the contact page.
(512) 925-3090 Ask for a Free Look
