What kind of system?
Heat pumps do not have heat strips. I supose you have a air handler with electric strips?
Sure. The strip heat in an air handler is usually built out of sections, for example 20kw kit might actually two 10kw banks. Pretty easy to spot a break in the element itself.
Could also be a failed over temp limit, sequencer, or switching contactor for a particular heat bank.
Man, that's a bit misleading to state that for folks that don't know any better. It's a heat pump unit and it most certainly has heat strips in it, because I put them there.
It's a package system and yes the heat strips are in the air handler section of the package, but that's getting pretty nit picky. Unit is a 6-7 year old Goodman 1.5 ton, 15 SEER if I recall correctly.
OccupantRJ,
Amp meter it is for that check. Thanks very much.
3rdgendslmech,
That was going to be my first step, I was more curious about other failed components that I might no be as familiar with. At 33 years old, you need to replace that system. Energy savings alone would hasten your payback.
Looks like the emergency heat on one of our heat pumps might not be working properly. The air at the floor registers is only about 78 degrees. Do the restive heating elements sometimes partially fail? I'm thinking maybe only one half of the element is on.
Oh I made an experiment today and disconnected the 10kW aux electric heat strips on my 15 year old Rheem high efficiency unit and set the thermostat to 68F with an outdoor temp of 26Fhere in Leesburg, GA. I'd like to see if I can drop my electric usage this month.
I was surprised I was getting warm air coming out of the vents and it satisfied the set point after one hour of runtime just running on heat pump with electric heat disconnected.
Don't recall it ever being an issue before. Weather has been very cold as it is everywhere. I might upgrade to an 8kw and see if it cures it, everything else seems to check out okay. This is only a 900 sq ft area in an in-law apartment.5KW is pretty small for a heat pump booster. Do you have any evidence that it ever worked any better?
If so, The temperature is a product of 3 variables: Heat input, air flow, and the temperature the air was before it was heated.
If you want to "automate" this for the long haul you could install an aux heat lockout (Outdoor Thermostat) kit in the heat pump. Has a rotary pot that lets you create a set point, for example 10 degrees outdoor ambient, above which the aux is always locked out. Below this it will be allowed to come on, and it will still come on during defrosts. Requires an extra wire run between the indoor and outdoor units.
I'm not a fan of having AC like cold air from the vents whenever the unit goes into defrost if you don't have strip heat connected to temper the air.
Hey, you may be aware of all of this....throwing it out there just in case.
More than $20 in a single day? How big of a space are you heating? That sounds extreme. My heat pump is more like $2.00-2.50 per day worth of kwhs when it stays below freezing all day, but I have aux heat completely locked out, and the space it's heating is only about 600 sq ft. I keep it set to 68. Heat pump has kept up fine so far, but it's getting down to sub-10 F tonight and tomorrow so we'll see if it can maintain 68 even with aux locked out...The Ecobee I just put in is set to not even bother with E-heat unless the outside hits 5F or below. We got to 9 LOL. I also have the differential between setting and ambient at 5F to avoid turning on the strips when coming off a low night time setback. So far so good. 100 hrs below 32, stayed 67~68 in the house all the time. Would not call that any "savings" as the compressor ran a bunch trying to pull heat out of cold air. Several days we burned more than $20 of kwhs.