Hail is part of the weather here
Bexar County recorded 268 hail events between 2015 and 2024. A heat pump's outdoor unit sits outside year round, and the coil and fan are exposed every time a storm comes through.
Heat Pump Repair in San Antonio, TX
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What that means for your unit
A bent fin or a dented fan blade does not always show up right away. If your heat pump is losing efficiency or making noise, past hail damage could be part of the reason, even if the unit looks fine from a few feet back.
- 5 months
- November through March, your system heats
- 7 months
- April through October, it cools
- 43°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 95°F
- the average summer afternoon it cools against
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NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
Bexar County logged 387 severe weather events between 2015 and 2024.
A heat pump's outdoor unit sits through all of it, so one that still runs after a storm is worth a look, not just one that stopped.
Your heat pump works nearly all year here, and November is when a weak one quits
Most heat pump problems here are not storm damage. They are a system that has been cycling on and off for months finally hitting a part that cannot take it anymore, a capacitor, a contactor, a low charge. San Antonio does not do anything unusual to a heat pump. It just runs the thing more hours per year than a lot of places do, so normal wear shows up on a normal schedule, just sooner. Texas electricity ran 14.94 cents per kilowatt-hour in 2024, so a unit that is low on refrigerant or straining through a dirty coil costs more to ignore here than somewhere it runs less. None of that means your repair is complicated. It usually means it is a fix a tech has made plenty of times, on a unit that has earned it.
A newer system is usually worth repairing
Half the homes in Bexar County were built in 1990 or later. If yours is one of them, your heat pump likely has years left in it, and whatever is wrong now is probably a known fix, not a reason to replace it.
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Years of storms add up on the unit outside
That same hail record is why a bent fin or dented fan blade isn't always the first thing a tech checks. If your heat pump is already acting up, have the outdoor unit looked over for storm damage along with whatever else gets tested. It's a quick thing to rule out, and skipping it means guessing at the real cause.
It's not heating or cooling like it should
A heat pump that runs long stretches without hitting the set temperature is often low on refrigerant, or the reversing valve is not switching cleanly between heating and cooling. Air that comes out only lukewarm in winter is worth a second look too, though a heat pump's heat is milder than a furnace's even when nothing is wrong.
Sounds and cycles are the early warning
Short cycling, where the unit shuts off and restarts every few minutes, usually points to a failing capacitor or a bad thermostat sensor. Grinding or squealing from the outdoor unit is often the fan motor bearings wearing out. Either one is worth calling in before the unit stops running altogether.
A lot of heat pump failures start small and get ignored because the system still technically runs. A capacitor weakens over months, not days, so the unit keeps starting but takes longer each time, until one morning it does not start at all. A contactor's contacts pit and burn a little every cycle, same idea. The reversing valve that switches between heating and cooling is also a common failure point, since it is one of the few parts doing mechanical work every single cycle change. Refrigerant does not get used up, so if a system is low, it is losing it somewhere, usually a slow leak at a fitting or coil. None of these are tied to how old the unit is. They are tied to how many cycles it has run.
Repair almost always makes sense if the fix is a single part. A capacitor, a contactor, a blower motor, a fan motor, these get swapped out and the system runs like it did before. What changes the math is the compressor. It's the one part that is expensive enough and risky enough to replace that a tech will usually talk through whether putting money into an old system still makes sense once the compressor is the problem. Everything short of that is routine. A heat pump that has one bad part and is otherwise cycling fine is a repair, not a decision.
