A winter on strip heat versus a winter on a heat pump, in Lake City dollars

The money, in plain terms

Start with what strip heat costs. Electric resistance heat turns one unit of electricity into one unit of heat, no better. A heat pump moves heat from outside air and delivers two to three units of heat for the same electricity on a typical Lake City winter day in the 40s and 50s. On the coldest nights the ratio falls, which is why the strips exist, but the average over a December-through-February here is strongly in the heat pump’s favor.

So a house in Mayfair that heats entirely on strips, whether because that’s what was installed or because the heat pump is misconfigured and the strips carry the load, is paying something like double to triple for heat compared with the same house on a working heat pump. Over a winter with a few dozen cold nights and several freezes, that difference is a few months of noticeably higher FPL or Clay Electric bills, not a rounding error. We won’t put a precise dollar figure on it because your house, your setpoint and your rate decide it. But if your winter bills look like your summer ones, the heat pump is not doing what it’s supposed to, and the fix is usually cheaper than the overpayment.

The flip side is a well-set-up heat pump in Lake City: cooling from May through September, heating from December through February, and a long shoulder season where it swings between the two in the same week without you touching anything. One machine, one maintenance plan, one set of parts.

What a day on the Lake City heat pump route looks like

7:15 a.m., Mayfair. First stop, a half-acre lot off SR 247. Complaint: heat runs all night, house never passes 66. Frost on the grass. The outdoor unit is running and iced over like a snow cone. The defrost board isn’t initiating. New board, defrost tested through a full cycle, aux staging checked at the thermostat. Forty minutes.

9:00 a.m., Cannon Creek Airpark. A hangar home with a ductless mini-split in the hangar and a conventional heat pump in the house. The mini-split isn’t heating. Filter packed with dust and the outdoor unit buried in pine straw. Cleaned, charge verified, owner shown where the filters are. This is also a heat pump; people forget.

11:30 a.m., Quail Heights. No heat since the storm two nights ago. Lightning on the FPL line. Transformer open, board scorched, thermostat dead. The compressor survived. Parts on the truck. The homeowner gets a surge protector at both units, because this is the second board in four years.

4:00 p.m., outside Fort White. Replacement estimate on a 1996 package heat pump behind a manufactured home on Clay Electric. The unit still runs, barely. The owner wants to know whether the co-op’s heat pump rebate applies. It does, for a qualifying unit of at least 15 SEER, paid to the member within a few months of purchase. Load calculation done, duct under the home inspected, estimate to follow in writing.

Then the long drive back to the shop on Fairmont Lane.

The tools and the checks

A heat pump visit carries everything a cooling visit does, plus the heating-side checks that a lot of installers in cooling-only markets never learned.

Check	Tool	What it tells us
Refrigerant pressures and temperatures	Digital manifold, pipe clamps	Charge, metering device health, compressor condition
Reversing valve operation	Temperature probes on the valve body	Whether the system is actually in heating mode or stuck between
Defrost cycle	Forced defrost at the board, stopwatch	Board, sensor and reversing valve coordination
Strip heat	Amp clamp on each stage	Whether every element works and whether they run when they shouldn’t
Aux heat staging	Thermostat configuration, outdoor temperature	The settings that decide your winter bill
Airflow	Static pressure probes, anemometer	Duct restriction, dirty coil, blower issues
Electrical	Meter, capacitor tester	Capacitors, contactor, board, transformer
Surge history	Visual on boards and contactor coil	Lightning damage, and whether protection exists

Call about your heat pump

What we find most often around here

• Aux heat staging set for a town that never freezes. The default on many thermostats brings strips on with a two-degree setpoint change. In Lake City that means strips every morning. Fixed with configuration, not parts.
• Defrost problems. Humid air and nights in the 30s are the recipe for coil frost, and defrost boards and sensors fail quietly. The symptom is an iced outdoor unit and a house that won’t warm.
• Pollen on the coil, still, in December. A spring coil wash that didn’t happen hurts the heating season too; a matted coil can’t absorb heat from cold air.
• Lightning damage. Boards, transformers, contactor coils, thermostats. Columbia County summers are full of it, and the damage sometimes doesn’t show until the first heating call in winter.
• Belly-board duct under manufactured homes that has fallen, split or filled with water, heating the crawlspace instead of the rooms. About a third of the county’s housing is manufactured, so this is a regular finding.
• Old package units behind rural homes from the 1990s, still running at a fraction of modern efficiency, on their third capacitor and second fan motor.

What happens next

If the finding is a repair, you get the price before the part goes in, and it doesn’t change by the hour or the day. If the finding is a configuration problem, it’s fixed on the visit and you get a short lesson on what was wrong. If the finding is a system at the end of its life, you get a free estimate on a new Lennox heat pump, the rebate paperwork that applies to your utility, and the financing options. The FPL rebate for city customers runs through contractors enrolled in its program; ask where Cook’s stands on that enrollment. [[CONFIRM WITH JERRY]] Clay Electric members apply for theirs directly.

Cook’s installs Lennox and repairs Lennox, Carrier, Bryant, Trane and the rest. The Lake City route is run from Palm Coast, and the dispatcher at 866-266-5709 will give you a window she can keep.