CoolPlain

A compressor pulls about six times its running current for under a second, and the lights show it. Your heat pump starts, and for a split second every light in the kitchen sags. Then it is over. In most houses that blink is normal. The compressor in the outdoor unit takes a big gulp of electricity to get spinning, about six times what it draws once it is running, and your wiring cannot hand over that much without the voltage sagging for a moment. The thing to watch is not whether it happens, but whether it is getting deeper or lasting longer. A big gulp, then a sip Every motor is hardest to start from a dead stop. Think of pushing a stalled car. The first shove takes everything you have, and keeping it rolling takes a light push. A compressor is the same. Standing still, its motor lets current pour in almost unchecked. As it spins up, that current falls fast, and in well under a second it settles at its normal draw. Here is where the lights come in. Electricity reaches your ...

The touch test: a bare older tank feels warm because heat is leaving it all day; a wrapped one loses far less. Put your hand flat on the side of your water heater. If the steel feels warm, you are paying to heat the basement, one quiet degree at a time. On an older electric tank that warmth can add up to about $40 a year in heat you never use, and a $20 to $30 insulating blanket gets most of it back in a Saturday morning. Newer tanks and gas tanks are a different story, and I will get to them. Why a warm tank is an expensive tank A storage water heater keeps 50 gallons (189 L) of water at about 120 degrees F (49 degrees C) around the clock, whether anyone showers or not. The basement around it might sit at 60 degrees F (16 degrees C). Heat flows from warm to cold, so the tank leaks heat through its walls all night and the element or burner keeps switching on to replace it. Engineers call this standby loss. Think of a mug of coffee. A thin mug gets hot on the outside and the coffe...

Three smells when the heat comes on, and what each one means You turn the heat on for the first time this fall, and within a minute the whole house smells like something is burning. Almost always, something is: the dust that settled on the hot parts of your heating system over the summer. It should fade within the first hour. Only two smells mean stop right now, and telling them apart takes about ten seconds. Six months of dust meets a hot surface From spring to fall, the heating side of your system just sits. Dust drifts in and settles on the heat exchanger, the metal box the burner heats and the blower pushes air across. In a heat pump it settles on the electric backup coils. In a radiator home, which is most of Europe, it collects between the fins and behind the panel. Then the first cold night arrives. Those surfaces go from room temperature to several hundred degrees in minutes. Household dust is mostly skin flakes, lint and pet hair, and all of it scorches at that heat. Th...