There’s nothing quite like a heat pump when it comes to home comfort. As long as you live in a warmer climate—as we do—it might be all you need for cooling and heating. How does it manage to do both jobs? Can it get stuck in one setting, unable to switch between heating and cooling? Your heat pump’s reversing valve is the answer to these questions. Read on to learn about this essential component and when you’ll need heat pump repair in Jefferson County, AL.
Heat Pump and Air Conditioner Components
A heat pump is, in most ways, just like an air conditioner. There’s a compressor in the outdoor unit. This is a costly and critical component. But what does it do? It keeps the refrigerant, a chemical that flows through the coils, under pressure. With that pressure, the refrigerant will keep cycling through the loop of coils, in and out of your house.
Refrigerant changes temperature very easily. This is how it can absorb heat in one place and let that heat go in another place. An air conditioner doesn’t exactly generate cold air. It simply absorbs the heat from the air and carries it away! Either of these systems will also have a fan to circulate the air through your home’s ductwork, and a motor to power the fan.
A Heat Pump’s Special Component
An air conditioner always carries heat in one direction: out of your home. Your heat pump, though, can carry heat either way, which is why it is such an efficient heating system. While furnaces and boilers have to generate heat from scratch, a process that requires a lot of energy, a heat pump simply moves it, which requires much less.
As you can see, there needs to be a special component to allow the refrigerant to reverse, and flow in the opposite direction, to make heating possible as well as cooling. That component is the reversing valve, an odd tube that might remind you a little bit of the center part of a trumpet. Just like a trumpet, parts of it open and close, forcing flow to go to certain places, but with the reversing valve, what flows is refrigerant, not air.
Making the Switch
There is a slider inside this component that can move, allowing the refrigerant access to certain openings while blocking off others. To move the slider, there must be power flowing to an electromagnet called a solenoid. And to tell the system that this change is necessary, there must be a signal from your thermostat.
If there’s a problem anywhere in that chain—a miscalibrated thermostat, a loose or disconnected electrical wire, or a dead solenoid—the slider won’t move. It will be left in the de-energized position, which is where it needs to be for the heat pump to heat your home. When you want to switch to cooling, it will need to be energized, and if that doesn’t happen, you’ll be stuck in heating mode.
None of these problems are very serious. Any of it can be fixed easily by a qualified professional. So if you find that your heat pump isn’t willing to start cooling your home when the weather heats up, all you need is one of our HVAC technicians to get it sorted out straight away.
“Your experience is what matters most!” Contact Douglas Cooling & Heating today for help with all your heat pump needs.
