Heating & Furnace Repair in Mesquite, TX

Every household in North Texas has a February 2021 story. What people remember is the cold and the dark. What we remember is the pattern in the calls, because a Texas hard freeze does not break heating equipment at random. It breaks the parts that have never once been asked to do their job.

Electric heat strips are the clearest case. In a normal winter a strip bank runs in short bursts and rarely energizes every stage. Hold the outdoor temperature in the teens for three days straight and all of it comes on and stays on, which is the first genuine full load that circuit has ever carried. Tired breakers trip, a loose or corroded lug starts heating up, and a sequencer that has been marginal for years finally sticks.

Heat pumps fail differently. Below freezing the outdoor coil ices over and the system is designed to reverse itself briefly to melt it clear. When the defrost board, the sensor or the reversing valve will not do that, the coil just keeps icing until the unit is a solid block and the house is coasting on auxiliary heat. It reads as a dead heat pump. Usually the heat pump is fine and the defrost control is not.

Then there is the condensate line. Defrost makes water, and around here those drain lines run through unconditioned attics that nobody bothered to insulate, because for eleven months of the year nothing up there is ever going to freeze. Hold the freeze long enough and the water in the line turns to ice, the line splits, and the damage shows up in a bedroom ceiling a week later once everything thaws.

A furnace here might log twenty hours in a mild winter and a few hundred in a hard one. Set that against the air conditioner, which runs most of June through September, and it is a reasonable conclusion that the furnace is effectively still new. Where performance is concerned, that is very nearly true.

Performance is not the reason for the annual check. The heat exchanger is. That is the metal wall keeping combustion gases on one side and the air your family breathes on the other, and it degrades through thermal cycling and corrosion rather than through hours logged. A furnace that sat idle through a damp fall can still crack, and a cracked heat exchanger is how carbon monoxide gets into the supply air.

Written plainly, because it deserves to be: this is a short inspection with a light, a mirror and a combustion analyzer, and the large majority of the time it comes back clean and you get on with your winter. When it does not come back clean, October is when you want to hear it, not the second night of a January cold snap with the system running around the clock.

Either way, put a working carbon monoxide alarm on every floor where somebody sleeps. That costs very little and it is not something you need us for.