Heat Pump Repair

A ducted heat pump does double duty — it heats your home in winter and cools it in summer using a single outdoor unit and your existing ductwork. That makes it one of the most efficient, versatile systems you can own, but it also means there are more moving parts and more ways for things to go wrong than a furnace or straight AC. When a heat pump fails, you can lose both heating and cooling at once, which is exactly why a fast, accurate diagnosis matters.

Quality Home Heating & Air has serviced and repaired heat pumps across the South Shore and South Coast since 1988. Heat pumps behave differently from conventional systems — they run in mild weather, they reverse their refrigerant flow between heating and cooling, and they go through defrost cycles in the cold. Technicians who don't work on them regularly often misread normal heat-pump behavior as a fault, or miss the real cause. We know what these systems are supposed to do, so we find what they're actually doing wrong.

Whether your unit has stopped heating on the coldest morning of the year, won't cool in July, is iced over, or is making a noise it never made before, we'll get to the bottom of it. We diagnose the true root cause, explain it in plain English, and give you an honest, upfront repair price before any work begins — so you're never surprised.

The most common culprit behind a heat pump that won't heat or cool is refrigerant — specifically a low charge from a leak. A heat pump moves heat using refrigerant, so even a small loss leaves it unable to keep up, and the system may ice over or short-cycle as it struggles. Refrigerant doesn't get "used up"; if it's low, there's a leak that needs to be found and repaired, not just topped off. We leak-check and repair rather than repeatedly recharging a system that's losing charge.

Heat pumps also depend on a handful of components that conventional systems simply don't have. The reversing valve switches the unit between heating and cooling — when it fails or sticks, you can get cold air on a heat call (or warm air on a cool call). The defrost board and its sensors manage how the outdoor unit melts off winter frost; when they fail, the unit either ices solid or runs defrost when it shouldn't. Faulty thermistors and sensors feed the control board bad readings, leading to erratic behavior, short-cycling, or the system falling back on expensive electric auxiliary heat.

Beyond those, heat pumps share the usual suspects with any HVAC system: failing capacitors and contactors, a worn compressor, a bad fan motor, clogged coils, a dirty or restricted filter choking airflow, or thermostat and wiring faults. A frozen outdoor unit, for example, can come from low refrigerant, a defrost fault, or simply blocked airflow — which is why we diagnose the cause instead of guessing at a part.