Derek ColeGM, Simmons One Hour Heating & Air · AI HVAC Answers

Burning Smell from Heat Strips? Here's Why! #shorts

6 Oct 2025 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:52

A short explanatory monologue (YouTube short) describing why a burning smell can appear when HVAC electric heat strips are first used after months of inactivity: dust accumulates on the heating elements and burns off on initial activation. The speaker says this is usually not dangerous—if it were dangerous wiring would overload or a breaker would trip—and recommends activating heat strips during maintenance to avoid the odor on the first cold night.

Chapters

Has gone from, I don't know, March, April. So March, April till now, without running heat strips. Without running heat. So what happens is dust builds up on those electric wires, and once those are activated, it burns it off. Therefore, you get a burning smell. So that is what you're getting in the house. Usually it's nothing dangerous. Now, if it was dangerous, it would obviously be too much for the wiring and trip the breaker and be a safety hazard. So if none of that is happening, then it's probably just burning off the excess dust from not being used. So that burning smell, when we come out and do a maintenance, we activate the heat strips this time of year to get out of the way. So that really first cold night, if you haven't used it already, you won't have that problem.