Southern California HVAC marketing is about summer. At roughly 2,600 feet on the Antelope Valley floor, the winter is real, the nights go below freezing, and heating deserves to be specified rather than assumed.
This is high desert. The same dry air that lets an afternoon climb hard also lets a night fall hard, and without the ocean anywhere nearby there is nothing holding the temperature up overnight. Freezing nights are ordinary rather than remarkable, and a cold snap can keep a house working all day.
Two practical consequences follow, and both get missed by contractors who mostly work down in the basin.
The first is sizing. Heating load here is a real number, calculated from the house, not a rounding error next to the cooling load. The second is equipment choice: some things that make perfect sense in a mild climate behave differently when the outdoor temperature is below freezing at six in the morning.
None of this is a reason to avoid a heat pump. It is a reason to choose one on the right number.
With a gas furnace, dropping the thermostat overnight and picking it back up in the morning is straightforwardly sensible — the furnace has the output to recover quickly.
With a heat pump it can backfire. Ask for a large recovery quickly on a cold morning and the system brings in the electric heat strips to do it, which is the most expensive way in the house to make heat. The result is a lower overnight setting that costs more than leaving it alone would have.
The fix is not complicated: a smaller setback, a slower recovery, or a thermostat that understands heat pumps and ramps the recovery rather than demanding it. We set this up on installation and we show you what it is doing, because a thermostat nobody understands gets overridden within a fortnight.
An "emergency heat" setting is not a boost button. It shuts the heat pump off and runs on resistance heat alone. It is there for when the heat pump has failed. Leaving it on through a cold week produces a bill people remember for years.
In that order. The first one is free.
In October, on a mild day, with the windows open. You will find out whether it starts, whether it smells, and whether it actually gets warm — at a point in the year when we can get to you within the week rather than on the first freezing night along with everybody else.
Drained, the water line isolated, the sump empty and the damper closed and sealed. A cooler left connected can freeze and split a line, and a damper that does not seal is an open hole in your ceiling for the whole of the heating season.
Burners, ignition, flame sensing, heat exchanger and flue on a furnace; the reversing valve, defrost control and heat strips on a heat pump. Plus the filter, the returns and a look at the duct, which costs you in both seasons.
A heat pump is designed to sit outside in this and does not want covering; a wrap traps moisture and gives rodents somewhere to live. What does want attention is drainage: the pad should not be sitting in a puddle that freezes, and the defrost water needs somewhere to go that is not the path to your front door.
Condensate lines matter too. A line that runs through an unheated space and slopes the wrong way can freeze, back up and trip the safety switch, which looks exactly like a system failure at six in the morning.
We are an HVAC contractor, not a plumber, so we will not pretend to be the last word on this. What we will do on a heating service is point out an exposed line or an uninsulated section we can see, because in a valley that freezes it is worth knowing.
The same applies to insulation and weatherstripping. We do not fit either. We will tell you where the house is losing heat if it is obvious from inside the attic, and then it is yours to do something about.
Probably not. A heat pump delivers a large volume of moderately warm air rather than a small volume of hot air, so it can feel cool against your hand while still heating the house perfectly well. The test is whether the room reaches the setpoint in a reasonable time, not how the supply air feels. If it never gets there, that is worth a call.
That is almost certainly a defrost cycle: the unit reverses briefly to melt frost off the outdoor coil, and the melt turns to vapour. It is designed behaviour. Worry if it is doing it every few minutes, if there is ice building on the coil that never clears, or if the system stops heating afterwards.
The most common explanation in this valley is auxiliary heat. If your system is bringing in the resistance strips regularly — because of a large overnight setback, a thermostat set to emergency heat, an undersized heat pump or a refrigerant problem — you are heating the house the expensive way without being told. It is diagnosable, and it is worth diagnosing before another winter.
Sometimes, and the honest answer depends on your electricity rate, your gas rate, the condition of the furnace and whether you also need cooling. What we will not do is give you a payback figure from your driveway. If the furnace is sound and the ductwork is good, "not yet" is a perfectly respectable answer and we say it regularly.
Same cause as the summer version of that complaint: the duct run to those rooms, the return air path, or both. Heating makes it more obvious because the temperature difference is larger. It is a ductwork job, not an equipment job, and a bigger furnace would make it slightly worse rather than better.
On the first freezing night everybody calls at once, and we cannot get to all of them.