When Should I Use My Thermostat’s ‘Emergency Heat’ Setting?

One of the major advantages of a heat pump is that you can use it during the winter and the summer. During the summer, it will take the heat inside your home and push it outside. Then, during the winter, it will take the heat from the outside and move it to the inside.

When the temperature drops below 40 degrees F outside, a heat pump will have a difficult time properly heating your home. Therefore, it will require another heat source, or an auxiliary option, to keep your house at the right temperature.

Your heat pump probably has an auxiliary heat strip built into it. When you trigger the emergency heat setting, it will lock the heat pump and force the auxiliary heat setting to provide 100 percent of the heat to your home. The downside to using this option is that it will significantly increase your electricity bill.

Therefore, you should only use this setting when a heat pump is not able to provide the necessary amount of heat for your home. The emergency heat setting will trigger your backup heater to provide heat to your home, keeping you safe until a technician can solve the problem.

If you want to keep your electricity bill low, you may want to drop the thermostat when you need to turn on the emergency heat setting. Then, give us a call to make an appointment with a heating and cooling technician from our team. We would be happy to take a look at your heat pump and figure out what the problem is.