Your August Ocala Electric bill is the first heating diagnostic of the year

What the summer bill says about winter

Inside Ocala city limits, Ocala Electric Utility serves about 56,000 customers, and the question we hear from them in September is the one that starts most of our heating work: why was August so high? The house has the same people in it, the thermostat sat at the same number, and the bill jumped.

Nine times in ten, the answer is a heat pump that is losing ground. Low refrigerant charge, a coil furred with spring pollen, a capacitor running weak, a duct joint in a 130-degree attic that let go and is pulling hot air into the return. The system still cools, so nobody calls. It just runs longer to do it, and in a city where the hot season doesn’t let up from early May until late September, longer runtime is the whole bill.

Here’s the part that matters for heating: it’s the same machine. The heat pump that labored through August is going to be asked, around December 12 when Ocala has its first coin-flip chance of a 32-degree night, to reverse itself and heat the house. Every weakness the summer exposed is still there. And when a heat pump can’t keep up in heating mode, the thermostat quietly calls for the electric strips, which heat the house fine and cost two to three times as much per hour to do it. That’s how a January OEU bill ends up looking like August.

So the August bill is a diagnostic. Read it that way.

What heating service is not, in a town where most heat is a heat pump

Ocala is mostly all-electric or LP. Peoples Gas has an Ocala division, and some older in-town neighborhoods and newer builds have gas, but the typical house here heats with a heat pump and a bank of electric strips as backup. That changes what heating service means.

It is not a furnace tune-up in most houses, because most houses don’t have a furnace. It is not a separate appliance from your air conditioning. It is not something that can be checked in July, because the heating side can’t be run and measured properly on a 90-degree afternoon without stressing the equipment. And it is not optional because winters are short: the handful of freezing nights Ocala gets each year, with a record low of 11 degrees on the books, arrive without much warning and tend to come in clusters.

What it is

Heating service at Cook’s in Ocala covers:

• Heat pumps in heating mode: reversing valve, defrost control, auxiliary heat staging, refrigerant charge measured for heating, outdoor coil and fan.
• Electric heat strips: element condition, sequencer, amp draw, and the thermostat logic that decides when they run.
• Gas and LP furnaces where they exist: heat exchanger inspection, burners, ignition, venting, combustion safety.
• Ductless mini-splits heating converted garages, Florida rooms and barn offices.
• Package units on the roofs and pads of 55+ villas in On Top of the World, Oak Run and Ocala Palms, many of them original equipment from the 1994 to 2010 build-out and aging out together.

Repair, maintenance and replacement are all on the table. Replacements are Lennox; repairs cover every brand with a nameplate.

The heating visit, step by step

1. The conversation. When did the bill jump, what does the thermostat show on a cold morning, does it ever say AUX or EM HEAT, which rooms lag.
2. Thermostat and staging. How the thermostat is set to bring on auxiliary heat, and at what outdoor temperature. A wrong setting here is the single most common cause of a shocking winter bill in the SR 200 corridor.
3. Outdoor unit in heating mode. We run it, watch the defrost cycle, and measure the refrigerant side for heating. A unit that cooled fine but can’t heat usually has a reversing valve or a charge problem.
4. Air handler. Strips tested individually under an amp clamp, sequencer checked, blower verified, filter and coil inspected.
5. Ductwork. Supply temperatures at the registers, especially the far rooms. In Ocala’s 1970s and 1980s attic-handler houses, a cold back bedroom is almost always a duct problem.
6. Combustion safety on gas or LP furnaces: heat exchanger, flame, venting, and a carbon monoxide reading.
7. The verdict. Readings written down, the repair priced before it starts, and if the equipment is past fifteen years with a major fault, both the repair number and the replacement number side by side.

Book a heating visit

Before the truck comes up SR 40: how to prepare

A little preparation makes the visit shorter and the diagnosis sharper.

• Pull up your last twelve months of electric bills from OEU, Duke, SECO or Clay Electric. The month-to-month shape tells us a lot.
• Note what the thermostat displays on a cold morning. A photo of the screen when it says AUX is worth a paragraph.
• Clear a path to the air handler. In attic houses that means the hallway under the access; in villas it’s usually the garage or a utility closet.
• Make sure the outdoor unit is reachable and not boxed in by landscaping. Heat pumps in heating mode need to shed defrost water, and a unit buried in mulch and shrubs can’t.
• If you’re on a private well, which about forty percent of Marion County parcels are, mention it. Hard, iron-rich water scales condensate pumps and drains, and that affects what we look at.

The technician arrives from Palm Coast, two hours west across the forest on SR 40, with the common parts for the major brands on the truck. There’s no after-hours charge, and a heating emergency on the coldest night of the year is dispatched the same as any other call. If the visit ends in a replacement conversation, the estimate is free, financing with low monthly payments is available, and the OEU, Duke or Clay Electric rebate that applies to your address goes in the paperwork. Ask about Cook’s enrollment on any utility’s contractor list when you book. [[CONFIRM WITH JERRY]]