A Dead 5 Year Old Carrier Heat Pump was in Desperate Need of a Quality Heat Pump Repair in Jonesborough, TN

We received a call from an existing customer in Jonesborough, TN in need of a heat pump repair. He stated that his 5-year-old Carrier heat pump was not keeping his home cool. He stated that his outdoor unit appeared to be running and the indoor blower was moving air inside his home. We always advise customers that if the HVAC unit is not working to turn the thermostat off.

When we arrived the customer had turned the thermostat off, which was great. We opened the outdoor unit’s electrical panel and hooked up probes to the system. We hooked our amp clamp onto the compressor’s common wire to get an inrush amp reading at startup. We fired the thermostat in cooling mode. We verified that the indoor blower was moving air inside the home. We went outside to the heat pump and the outdoor fan motor was running, but we did not hear the compressor running and our probes were showing equalized pressure.

We pulled the outdoor service disconnect to shut down high voltage electricity to the outdoor unit. We read the inrush reading on the compressor at startup and it drew 111.6 amps when it tried to start which exceeds the LRA of 105.5 amps. We tested the dual the run capacitor on this 5-year-old heat pump and the compressor side of the capacitor only read 1.1 microfarads when it should have been reading 70 microfarads. We tested the fan side of the capacitor as well and the fan side was testing in range. We advised the customer that the dual run capacitor on his 5-year-old Carrier heat pump had already failed and that he needed a new one installed on his heat pump.

We were authorized for the repair, so we grabbed a new dual run capacitor from our van stock. We replaced the poor-quality OEM dual run capacitor with a USA made Mars dual run capacitor. We made sure to tighten the stake-ons for each wire connection to help prevent burnt connections in the future. We greased the service disconnect pullout with di-electric grease and hooked our amp clamp up to the common wire of the compressor to do another inrush amp reading at startup. We cleaned up the cob webs and dead bugs from inside the electrical panel on the heat pump and restored high voltage to the outdoor heat pump.

The outdoor heat pump compressor and fan motor started this time. The heat pump was cooling again. We noticed a rattling noise inside the heat pump while it was running so we pulled the outdoor service disconnect again to turn the outdoor unit off. We popped the top of the heat pump and inspected the refrigerant lines inside the machine. We noticed that several of the distributor tubes which carry refrigerant to the outdoor coil were rubbing together and that was the rattling noise we heard. We separated the tubing to prevent them from rubbing through one another which would cause the customer to lose all of their refrigerant inside the machine leading to an expensive repair. These tubes can vibrate over time, debris can cause them to move, snow or ice can move them, or maybe even heavy rain fall so it is something that we are trained to listen for while monitoring a system.

We put the top back on and put the service disconnect pullout back in. We monitored the inrush amp reading of the compressor again at startup. The inrush amps went from 111.6 amps at the initial test in with a failed dual run capacitor on the compressor side all the way down to 13.9 amps. We allowed the system to run for 20 minutes and monitored the system with our Bluetooth communicating probes. The unit was within range on its rated performance with sub-cooling, superheat, pressures, coil temperatures, and indoor temperature split. We cleaned up our tools and work area. We set the indoor thermostat to the customer’s desired set point for cooling mode and the unit was cooling again.

If you reside within our service area of Northeast Tennessee and you are in need of a heat pump repair, please feel free to reach out to us. We do a thorough job and are the company to call if you value quality workmanship. Stay safe and best wishes.

Location: Jonesborough, TN