Emergency Heat Pump Repair in Elgin & the Fox Valley

Is This a Heat Pump Emergency?

Some heat pump problems need a truck tonight. Others can wait for a morning appointment at the regular rate. Here’s how we sort them.

What to Do Right Now

Before anything else, keep the house safe and buy yourself time.

Switch to emergency heat. Most heat pump thermostats have an “Emergency Heat” or “EM Heat” setting. It shuts the heat pump off and runs the backup heat by itself: electric heat strips in the air handler, or the gas furnace on a dual-fuel system. Backup heat costs more per hour to run, but it keeps the house warm until the technician arrives, and it stops a failing outdoor unit from doing more damage to itself. Auxiliary heat normally comes on by itself when the heat pump can’t keep up; emergency heat is you telling the thermostat to stop trying.

If emergency heat doesn’t work either. Check the breaker for the air handler and the heat strips, which is often a separate, larger breaker. If it’s tripped, reset it once. If it trips again, leave it off and call. If the breakers are fine and there’s still no heat, the problem is in the air handler or the controls, and that’s the emergency call.

Below freezing with no heat at all. Open cabinet doors under sinks on exterior walls. Let faucets on exterior walls drip. Close off unused rooms and keep everyone in one space. Space heaters are fine on their own circuit and away from anything flammable. Never use a gas range, grill or generator indoors for heat.

Summer, and the indoor coil or outdoor unit is iced up. Switch the thermostat from Cool to Off and set the fan to On. The indoor blower will thaw the coil in an hour or two while the compressor rests. Running it iced up can slug the compressor with liquid refrigerant, which turns a cheap repair into a replacement.

Dual-fuel homeowners: smell gas? Leave the house right away, call 911 from outside, and call your gas utility’s emergency line from outside before calling us.

If the Outdoor Unit Is Iced Over

Frost is normal. A cabinet encased in ice, with the fan blades locked or the coil buried, is a defrost failure and it needs attention.

• Switch to emergency heat. This stops the heat pump so it doesn’t run with a blocked coil and lets the backup carry the house.
• Don’t chip the ice. Screwdrivers and hammers bend fins and puncture coils. A punctured coil is a refrigerant leak on top of the original problem.
• Don’t pour hot water on it. It refreezes on the fan and in the base pan, and it can crack a cold coil.
• Clear what’s around it. Snow piled against the unit, a downspout dumping onto it, or a roofline dripping straight into the cabinet all cause ice. Move the snow away and let the unit sit.
• Check the base. If the unit is sitting in a puddle or the base pan drain holes are frozen shut, defrost water has nowhere to go. That’s a mounting problem we fix at the repair.
• Call us. Ice that keeps coming back means a defrost sensor, defrost board, reversing valve or low charge. On inverter systems it can be a board or sensor reporting the wrong coil temperature. We test the defrost cycle rather than just melting the ice and leaving.

Five Things to Check Before You Call

About one call in ten ends here. Worth two minutes.

• Thermostat mode and batteries. Confirm it’s in Heat (or Cool), the setpoint is above (or below) room temperature, and the display is on. A dead battery in a battery-powered thermostat is the most common no-heat we find in November.
• Breakers. The outdoor unit, the air handler and the heat strips can each have their own breaker. Look for any that’s tripped or sitting between on and off. Reset once. If it trips again, stop and call.
• Outdoor disconnect. The gray box on the wall near the outdoor unit. Make sure the pull-out or switch is in, and that it wasn’t knocked loose by a mower or a shovel.
• Filter. A filter so loaded that the air handler can’t breathe will freeze the coil in summer and trip a limit in winter. If you can’t see light through it, replace it and give the system an hour.
• Condensate float switch. Air handlers have a safety switch that shuts the system down when the drain pan fills. If the drain is clogged, the system won’t run at all. Clearing the drain line restarts it; we’ll fix the cause.

If you have an outdoor unit that hums but the fan doesn’t spin, or a system that starts and stops every minute, leave it off. Those symptoms usually mean a failed motor, capacitor or board, and running it makes the repair bigger.

What the Technician Does on Arrival

An emergency call is the same diagnosis as a daytime call, done faster and with a truck stocked for the season.

First five minutes. We confirm what you’re seeing, check the thermostat configuration, and look at the outdoor unit and air handler. If backup heat is available and off, we get it running so the house starts recovering while we work.

Diagnosis. We pull the fault codes from the thermostat and the inverter board, then test the actual failure: capacitors and contactors on conventional units, inverter output on variable-speed units, the reversing valve and defrost control in winter, refrigerant pressures and temperatures, heat strip sequencers and relays, the condensate drain and float switch. Reversing valve and defrost control faults are heat-pump-specific and we see them every winter.

Your price before the work. We tell you what failed and give you a flat price. The repair is quoted flat-rate, and you approve that price before any work. If the failure is a compressor or a major refrigerant leak on an older unit, we say so honestly, get backup heat running for the night and come back with a replacement quote rather than selling you a repair the system won’t outlive.

The repair. Capacitors, contactors, fan motors, defrost sensors, float switches and common boards are on the truck. Compressors and some inverter boards are ordered for your exact model, and we keep backup heat running until they arrive. Before we leave, the system runs through a full heating or cooling cycle with readings recorded, and in winter we force a defrost cycle and watch it complete.

What Emergency Heat Pump Repair Costs

Flat diagnostic fee, then a flat-rate repair price you approve before work starts. During office hours (9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday) the service call is $130; weekday evenings after 5 p.m. it is $180, and nights, weekends and holidays are $260. Each includes 30 minutes of travel and 30 minutes of diagnostics, and parts are extra. The after-hours rate is higher than a daytime call, and you hear it before we dispatch.

After-hours service calls are priced higher than business-hours calls, and we tell you that rate when you phone, before anyone is dispatched. The repair itself is flat-rate. Common heat pump repairs such as capacitors, contactors, fan motors, defrost sensors and float switches typically run $300 to $1,400, similar to air conditioning repairs. Reversing valves, refrigerant leak repair and compressor replacement can run into the thousands, which is where the repair-or-replace conversation starts.

The 50% rule applies even at 2 a.m.: if the repair is half the cost of a new system and the unit is past 10 to 12 years, we’ll recommend getting you through the night on backup heat and quoting a replacement in the morning. A qualifying new ducted heat pump earns a ComEd instant discount of $900 to $2,000 on the invoice, which changes that math. St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia run their own electric utilities, so ComEd discounts aren’t available there.

Members of the $240 maintenance plan get priority scheduling, one free business-hours service call a year and 5% off repairs. Larger repairs can be spread out through financing; you can prequalify in about 2 minutes with no impact to your credit score.

The Cold Snap and the Heat Wave

Heat pumps fail on the days they work hardest, and that’s when every HVAC company in the Fox Valley is busiest.

An Amana S-Series R-32 inverter heat pump installed by our team. Set on a riser so defrost water and snow stay clear of the coil, which is the mounting detail that prevents most winter ice calls.

The first cold snap. The first week in October or November when overnight lows hit the 20s is when a heat pump that sat idle all fall reveals a failed defrost board, a stuck reversing valve or heat strips that haven’t been asked to work since March. We stage for it: more trucks, more parts, longer hours. Plan members go to the front of the line.

The heat wave. The first stretch of 90°F days in June or July finds every weak capacitor and dirty coil in the county. Heat pumps that cool are air conditioners in summer, and the failures are the same. See emergency AC repair if your cooling-only system is down.

Avoid both. The fall visit on the maintenance plan tests the defrost cycle, the reversing valve and the heat strips before the cold comes. The spring visit cleans the coil and tests the capacitors before the heat. Most of the emergency calls we run are on systems that skipped one of those.

Emergency Heat Pump Repair Across the Fox Valley

Based in Elgin, we answer emergency heat pump calls throughout Kane, McHenry, DuPage and DeKalb counties, 24 hours a day.

• Elgin
• South Elgin
• St. Charles
• Aurora
• Bartlett
• Streamwood
• Huntley
• Plato Center
• Sycamore
• Carpentersville
• West Dundee
• East Dundee
• Algonquin
• Gilberts
• Hampshire
• Pingree Grove
• Campton Hills
• Geneva
• Batavia
• Barrington
• Hoffman Estates
• Schaumburg
• Burlington
• Marengo
• Wayne
• Sleepy Hollow

Don’t see your town? Call (847) 224-2420. View all service areas.