Homeowner here, with a Goodman GPH1324M41AC heat pump, heating/cooling a ~1200sq ft 1-story house. A few days ago, the compressor wouldn't start when the thermostat turned it on.
I have a tech come out. After a bunch of diagnosis and repair, 3 things got changed:
- Defrost control board was fried (nice brown discoloration on the circuit board where it burned out), replaced it.
- Defective high-pressure switch is killswitching the compressor. His recommendation was just bypass the switch, because replacing it is expensive in labor (hard to get to), and the kinds of damage it protects against are low probability and not worth worrying about.
- Problem with the blower control time relay, blower never starts even after expected delay. Again, his recommendation was just bypass it and hardwire the blower to run whenever the compressor is running, not worth the expense to get replacement parts given my system doesn't need fancy speed controls or delays.
(God knows what happened to blow up all this stuff seemingly at once...)
Since he's the expert, I went with what he recommended. I did make it clear that I didn't have a problem paying for parts and his labor rates if an expensive replacement was the way to go, but he maintained that the cheaper option was fine and I should just do that.
This is the first time I've seen an HVAC tech go "off script" like this, custom-wiring the unit rather than repair back to original spec. His reasoning was basically that this unit is more usually seen in commercial settings where the extra bells and whistles like high-pressure cutoff and blower speed controls actually matter, and since I don't need them, why bother repairing them?
So... Does this make sense? Is this kind of repair a common thing that I'm only just discovering because I asked questions beyond "it works? Cool, here's your money!" ? I'm torn between trusting his experience, and worrying that this will shorten the life of my system and cost me more in the long run. What do you folks think?
(And to top if off, blower won't start again... Tech's coming back but I suspect I have a blower replacement in my future)
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