Pump up the ...heat?

If you didn't already know (and I didn't; we had gas heat in our old house), a heat pump acts as both an air condition and a heater. It does this (and this process is quite ingenious and efficient) by circulating a gas (typically freon) one way in the summer months to cool and then changing the flow direction in the winter months to heat. If you're interested in the details of how it works, get a more thorough explanation on Wikipedia.

Unfortunately, the beautiful efficiency of the design is also one of the system's down falls. Since your heater and air conditioner are part of the same unit, when the heat pump goes bad, you're doubly screwed.

A heat pump system is made up of two main parts, the heat pump unit (the thing that looks like a conventional air conditioner that sits outside your house, see picture) and the air handler (the inside unit the blows the air through the house, what people typically call "the furnace").

At this point, a little history of freon will help to give some perspective. Freon (actually a trade name registered to DuPont) is a gas that is continually circulated through your system and is compressed and expanded to either heat or cool. Freon based air conditioning has been used for the better part of 100 years and freon based air conditioning has been used in autos for more than 50 years.

Freon and other CFC's are great for cooling and for powering aerosol cans, but these compounds really suck for the environment. Remember when we were all talking about the destruction of the Ozone Layer back in the 80's and 90's? CFC'c took the fall for it.

According to the Clean Air Act of 1990 a schedule was created to phase out freon and other CFC's. In 1996 freon was banned from production in the United States. After 2010, the manufacture of new appliances (including air conditioners) that use freon will be prohibited, and in 2020, production of freon will be banned completely.

Now back to why this is important to our heat pump. Our system used freon. Perfectly legal now, but certainly in the twilight of its life-cycle. As we get closer and closer to the 2020 cut-off date, the cost to maintain a freon system will skyrocket (freon is already up to $85 per pound).

In our case, it was the air handler that crapped out. We could have fixed the air handler, but the repair for that would have totaled about 70% the cost for replacing it with a completely new one.

Our dilemma was to either fix what was broken with the hopes that the entire system would hold up for a few more years or replace the system now with a Puron system (pronounced PURE-on). Puron, which has been around since 1996, is touted as the safe alternative to freon. The pro for fixing the air handler is that it is much cheaper (MUCH cheaper). The con for only fixing the air handler is that all the money spent would be hinged on the longevity of a aging heat pump. Go on the cheap and cross your fingers or bite the bullet and change the whole system (an inevitability anyway).
Since we plan to stay in our current house for a good long while, we ended up going the more expensive route and replaced the whole system.

The moral of the story is that if you are looking to buy a house or if your current heat pump is about to blow, figure out if you have a freon or Puron system. Right now. You still have some options regarding the repair/replacement but as we get closer to 2010 freon systems will be even less attractive than they are now. The second moral of the story is that if you live in Marion County, you are required to use a licensed technician to do the work.