Winter Emergency Heating Services Winchester

All winter long, it's not advisable to use emergency heat. Emergency heat is meant to be a stopgap measure for when your home's main heating system (like a heat pump) isn't doing its job. That might be happening for several reasons, but the most common one is that it's just too cold outside for the heat pump to extract enough heat from the frigid air. The temp difference is just too great; at some point, the pump's going to sound like a very expensive air conditioner that works only in reverse. So is it just inoperative? Or should we be asking whether it's performing up to standard? You could also ask why such a system would be in a house to begin with, but that's a different essay.

An emergency involving heating typically happens when a heating system breaks down during freezing weather and leaves a home or business without adequate heat. This can lead to very dangerous living situations, with people susceptible to hypothermia, especially during the winter months. Such emergencies might require an immediate call to a Winter Emergency Heating Services provider in Winchester to get the heat restored and ensure the safety of the people inside.

If the temperature outside falls below 30°F and your heat pump cannot keep your house warm, you should set your heat pump to emergency heat. You also should use emergency heat if your heat pump is having some sort of problem and can't operate normally. Although heat pumps are really efficient and cheap to run—seriously, if you're not using a heat pump, you're living in the dark ages—emergency heat costs five to ten times as much because, unlike heat pumps, it doesn't use electricity to get heat from the ground.

How much you end up paying for emergency heat in Winchester can hinge on several variables, among them your energy supplier, current fuel prices, and what kind of heating system you're using. Though we're mainly talking about gas furnaces here, the principles apply to any type of heating system: when a furnace isn't efficient—because it's either too small, too big, or way too old—it has to burn more fuel (or use more energy) just to maintain a low-enough temperature that keeps the furnace from shutting down (thus, any half-baked ideas for heat that you might have been thinking about are not economically or environmentally sound).

It is perfectly acceptable for a heat pump to operate continuously for an entire night during the winter. These devices are built to perform the task of "consistent heating, even in temperatures that are much lower than summertime averages." Furthermore, they are and should be "more energy-efficient than other types of heating systems" because they "transfer heat rather than generate it." But, of course, we want to be "energy-efficient" for reasons that are much more significant than keeping our utility bills low.

Emergency heat in Winchester has a significant disadvantage. That is, it relies on electric resistance heating, which is less efficient and more costly to run than more conventional forms of heat such as heat pumps or gas furnaces. If you use emergency heat, you can expect to see a surge in your energy bills. You may also experience something that can feel almost as unpleasant as cold temperatures: uneven heat distribution in your home. Prolonged use of emergency heat can also lead to something that could feel very unpleasant: maintenance issues or an outright failure of your heating system.

In most circumstances, it's less expensive to operate a heat pump than to run emergency heat. A heat pump works by drawing warmth from the air outside and putting it inside—an efficient process when the outside air is at or above freezing, as it is for much of the winter in Energy Star's Zone 4. Even in our coldest months, the average temperature for January hovers around 25 degrees Fahrenheit.Emergency heat, on the other hand, is energy-inefficient and expensive to use and costs more because you're using it when your heat pump needs a backup.

In Winchester, a standard heat pump begins to lose efficiency when the temperature falls to about 30 to 25 degrees Fahrenheit. At these lower temps, the heat pump has trouble pulling enough heat from the outside air to keep the inside of the house warm. It can't do it alone, meaning it's relying on these other heating sources—electric resistance heaters and gas furnaces—to do the heavy lifting.

There are several reasons why your heat pump might be running continually in the winter even after the desired temperature has been reached. One possibility is that it is simply working to achieve that more even distribution of the heat it has generated throughout the space—an operation that can be rather more labor-intensive for a heat pump to accomplish when it has to work against an extremely cold indoor environment. If the pump is only of slight capacity, it may simply be working long and hard to perform what is, in essence, a small miracle: heating an indoor space to comfortable levels during an arctic outside environment. And if it isn't the pump or the space it's heating, it could be the thermostat: easily the most likely culprit to be either some kind of calibration issue or simply malfunctioning. Another work possibility is that the pump is working, as it's designed to do, to keep itself free of any ice buildup that might otherwise impair its operation.

If your goal is to save on energy costs, it is generally not cheaper to keep a heat pump running all day. A heat pump is designed to be energy-efficient while keeping indoor temperatures constant. But running the system all day—and particularly running it when you're not home—can lead to some pretty hefty figures on your utility bill. Your best bet for keeping energy costs low while maintaining a comfy indoor temperature is to use a programmable thermostat. Set it to a lower temperature when you're away and to a comfortable level when you're home, and run the heat pump only as necessary.