What twenty below does to a house.
A Minneapolis cold snap finds every weak part in a heating system in about forty-eight hours. Here’s what breaks, and why.
The furnace runs and runs
At twenty below, a furnace sized for the house runs nearly nonstop. That’s normal. What isn’t normal is a furnace that cycles on and off every few minutes, which usually means a dirty flame sensor or a clogged filter tripping a safety.
The vent pipes freeze
High-efficiency furnaces exhaust through plastic pipes on the side of the house. Their exhaust is wet, and at twenty below the moisture freezes at the pipe’s tip. Ice builds, the furnace senses the blockage and shuts down. Clearing the ice safely gets the heat back; extending or reconfiguring the termination keeps it from happening again.
The heat pump leans on backup
A cold-climate heat pump keeps working at twenty below, but it delivers less heat than at twenty above, and the house needs more. Backup heat, a furnace or electric strips, makes up the difference. That’s why most of our heat pump installs here keep the furnace.
The pipes on outside walls
The heat might be fine and a kitchen pipe still freezes, if it runs in an exterior wall with poor insulation. Open the cabinet doors, let the tap drip, and call us the next fall to reroute or insulate it.
Cold snap in the forecast? Book the check now.
The cold-climate heating site, built in seven days.
Sixteen pages: a live outdoor-temperature ladder, an honest cold-climate heat pump page that says when to keep the furnace, and a no-heat line that leads every page from November to March.