Every fall we get the same phone call. First cold morning, heat pump kicks on, house won’t warm up, and now it’s 38 degrees in the kitchen and someone’s yelling. Nine times out of ten, that phone call was preventable by 45 minutes of work in September.
Here’s what a real fall tune-up looks like — the version we actually run on a service call, and the parts you can honestly do yourself before you decide whether to book us.
What we do on a paid tune-up
When we roll a truck out to your house for a fall heat-pump check, this is what’s in the visit:
- Pull the outdoor unit’s top cover and clean the coil from the inside out. Cottonwood, grass clippings, dog hair, and a shocking amount of pine needles collect between the fins. A clogged coil is the #1 reason a heat pump loses efficiency without throwing a code.
- Check the refrigerant charge with gauges — not just “sounds about right.” An undercharged system will run all day and not keep up. An overcharged one will short-cycle and beat itself to death.
- Inspect the reversing valve and the defrost control board. These are the two parts most likely to strand you in January if they’re going bad in September.
- Pull the indoor blower access, check the wheel for buildup, and verify the auxiliary strip heat comes on when it’s supposed to (and doesn’t come on when it isn’t).
- Check the drain pan and condensate line. Heat pumps produce condensate in heating mode too, and a clogged line in November will flood your closet ceiling.
- Tighten every electrical connection at the disconnect, contactor, and control board. Loose connections are how blower motors and control boards die.
- Test the temperature split across the indoor coil. In heating mode, we’re looking for 20–30 degrees of rise. Anything less means something isn’t right.
- Verify the outdoor fan runs the correct direction and the compressor amp draw is inside spec.
That’s about 45 minutes to an hour on a residential unit. We write down what we found and what we did, and if anything’s borderline we tell you now instead of surprising you in December.
What you can honestly do yourself
If a tune-up isn’t in the budget this year, do these five things and you’ll catch most of what would go wrong:
1. Cut back everything within 2 feet of the outdoor unit. Grass, shrubs, that pallet you leaned against it in July. The unit needs airflow to work.
2. Rinse the outdoor coil with a garden hose on shower setting. Spray from the inside out if you can get the top off, otherwise from the outside is better than nothing. Do not use a pressure washer — you will bend the fins and make it worse.
3. Change the indoor filter. If you can’t remember the last time you did, it’s overdue. A 1-inch filter should be changed every 60–90 days during heating and cooling season.
4. Run the heat for 10 minutes on the first cool day. Do this before you actually need heat. If you smell a burning-dust smell, that’s normal — that’s dust burning off the strip heat coils. If you smell anything else, or if the system runs and the air isn’t warm, call us before it’s an emergency.
5. Look at the outdoor unit while it’s running. Fan should spin smoothly, no rattling, no vibration you can feel through the cabinet. If you hear a metallic scraping or a loud hum without the fan spinning, shut it off at the breaker and call.
When it’s absolutely worth calling us instead
Skip the DIY route if any of these apply:
- Your system is over 12 years old — the tune-up is also a health check on whether it’s time to plan for a replacement
- The refrigerant type is R-22 — that refrigerant is no longer manufactured, and if you have a leak, the repair math changes completely
- You have auxiliary strip heat and you don’t know if it’s working — this is the biggest wintertime electric-bill trap, and it needs actual measurement, not visual inspection
- You’ve had a repair on this system in the last 12 months — a follow-up check is cheap insurance
- You have a heat pump older than the house you’re in, or you inherited it and don’t know its history
What we specifically look for in the Sequatchie Valley
A few things that are more common here than in flatter, drier parts of the country:
- Condensate line clogs from valley pollen and hickory catkins. We add a wet-vac step to every fall tune-up in this area.
- Coil fouling from dryer vents on manufactured homes. If the outdoor unit is downwind of a dryer vent, we clean the coil twice as hard.
- Foam-insulated houses fighting themselves. If your house is spray-foamed, the heat pump can short-cycle because the load is so small. We check the run-time patterns for this specifically. If you have a foam house, we have a whole page on this.
- Crawlspace ductwork sagging. In our valley crawlspaces, humidity is high year-round. Duct straps rust. Insulation compresses. We stick our head under the house and look.
Pricing (fall 2026)
Straight-up residential heat-pump tune-up in our normal service area (Whitwell, Dunlap, Jasper, Pikeville, South Pittsburg, Kimball, Chattanooga, Sand Mountain, and points between): $135 for the first system, $110 for each additional system on the same property.
If we find something borderline during the tune-up, we quote it before we do it. No surprise line items, no “while we’re here” upsells you didn’t ask for.
Book it
Call (423) 637-1846. Sheddie usually answers. Tell us the town, your make of unit if you know it, and whether you’ve had it serviced in the last year.
We book fall tune-ups roughly one week out in September, two weeks out in October, and by November the schedule is mostly emergency calls. Book early if you can.