Ants

Music

Saturday the Nuk’str and I went into Raleigh for this years first Downtown Live Concert. The featured band was the Wailers; of Bob Marley fame. I wish Ziggy would play with them – but – since it’s been so long that’ll probably never happen.

Ants

My house has 2 heat pumps – one large one for the main house and a smaller one for the bonus room / Nuke’s apartment.

Friday, Nuke’s A/C wouldn’t come on – the heat pump outside just made a buzzing sound.

Being the weekend I told the Joyner and Dickson Heating and Air answering service to just wait till this week to come out so as not to incur a high dollar weekend service charge.

The 2 J&D guys came by around 1800 (6 PM) on Tuesday.

If you keep your eyes and ears open, you’ll learn something new everyday.

Today, I learned something about ants and heat pumps.

I live on the border between the NC Coastal Plain and the Piedmont. More specifically, I’m at the edge of the Sandhills which is a sub zone within the Coastal Plain. The main characteristic of the region are low rolling hills amongst a flat plain – all made of sand. (The sandy hills are remnants of ancient coastal barrier islands.)

And in sand live ants.

All sorts of ants. We got little red pea ants; small and large black ants; and the dreaded fire ant – whose bite hurts like hell.

Turns out – the A/C problem was caused by ants.

The heat pump has a contactor with points. Recall cars that used to have points before electronic ignition systems? Same sort of thing. The contactor closes the points which causes the circuit to close and the heat pump to turn on.

Well, ants get into the contactors and they insulate or sometimes even short out the contact points – which eventually causes the points to burn out. Also the contactors age anyway – just like points did on older cars. But the ants can cause the contactor to burn out prematurely.

The service guy said that a full 1/3 of their service calls were to replace burned out contactors due to ants. Newer replacement contactors now have covers to help keep the ants out – kind of like sealed units.

 

 

 

So – if you have a heat pump – make sure you keep the ants away. If you have an ant hill near or next to your heat pump like mine in the photos – you’re going to have trouble and spend $ on a service call.

 

Contactors were replaced in both heat pumps.