Derek Cole explains how to tell when your heat pump's backup heat is running: look for an emergency heat indicator on your thermostat, get preseason HVAC maintenance to avoid triggering it, and adjust your setpoint to reduce expensive strip-heat runtime.
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Foreign. Hey, this is Derek Cole and welcome to the Derek Cole Podcast. This podcast is all about home comfort and energy savings. The majority is really comprised of short audio clips of advice and answers to questions that we've been asked over the years. We also kind of sprinkle in the Ask Derrick Cole show audio, which is a much longer Q and A kind of program. If you like this episode, and I hope you do, I would love for you to share it on social with others. Just take a screenshot of the program and hashtag it Derek Cole so I can see you. But let's get into today's episode.
One way to know that it's actually on is by going to your thermostat. It should indicate emergency heat with the 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. There's 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 that 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 hour bill. So that's one thing I would recommend. I would also, you know, when your system is running, just kind of go back to the 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 kind of bump it down and turn it off because I'm fixing to take a shower and I fix it 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 a tip I would give you.
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