Check your thermostat for a red light or digital indicator to see if emergency heat is running. Get HVAC maintenance before winter, watch your thermostat settings to avoid surprise strip-heat bills, and lower the temperature during short periods like before a shower to keep it off.
Chapters
One way to know that it's actually on is by going to your thermostat. It should indicate emergency heat with a red light or auxiliary heat should be on the digital version. If you have an old school thermostat, you see the auxiliary or emergency heat light on. That is one way to find out. Another thing to do, which I would recommend is to get the unit maintenance before it really starts the heating season that way because some people can get surprised at their heat or their AC is running with the strip heat and there's some kind of malfunction. It's working correctly, you're comfortable. But the power bill comes in, it's you know, 4, 5, 600 bucks. You're like, what in the world is going on? So I would get a maintenance done before the heating season, just like before the cooling season, get it checked out to make sure everything's working properly and make sure everything's good to go. Because you don't want to, you know, in the month get that large bill where it's been kind of mild, but the heat strips have been operating with the cooling or the heating and you didn't know about it and you're stuck with a $500 bill. So that's one thing I would recommend. I would also, you know, when your system is running, just kind of go by thermostat, look at it, make sure auxiliary or emergency heat is not on. One thing I do at my house myself is when it gets starts getting really cold outside. I do have a set point of like 68 or whatever. So maybe in the morning when I get up, the emergency heat might be on. So I kind of got to bump it down and turn it off because I'm fixed to take a shower and I'm fixing to get hot and it's fixing, you know, I don't need it at that point. That's just something I do. I'm kind of paranoid about keeping that emergency heat off whenever is possible. Now if it's 20 degrees outside and I want to be comfortable, you know it's going to run. So that is the tip I will give you.
