Heat pump repair in Burke.

Only about three in a hundred Burke owner homes were built after 2000. Half went up before 1980, and almost all the rest in the 1980s and 90s. That means a heat pump in Burke was not part of the build. It went in later, and often it is the second or third pump the house has had. We see a lot of equipment that was added to a house that already had something else.

A mix of owner homes: just over half of Burke owners use electric heat, nearly as many use gas, and detached houses outnumber townhouses by a good margin. So a Burke call may be a 1970s single-family house with its pump on the side yard, or a townhouse on a pad out back. The house age is what to tell us. A 1970s house with a 2008 pump is the usual story, and the usual fault is a worn capacitor or contactor.

Because everything is a replacement, matching matters. A new outdoor unit on an old air handler, or the reverse, does not always run the way it was built to, and it is the source of a lot of odd Burke symptoms: weak heat, short cycling, a coil that ices on mild days. If a past install mixed old and new, a tech who spots it saves you a series of part swaps.

Burke Centre townhouses sit in rows with pads behind them and air handlers in closets. Lake Braddock and the older streets around Burke Lake Road are single-family houses with air handlers in attics, basements and crawlspaces. In both, a thermostat that holds aux heat all day when it is 45 outside means the pump has stopped carrying its share.