Repair fan motor or replace entire unit? 13 year old electric heat pump.
I'm looking for advice on my electric heat pump that isn't working at all. I returned home from a week away visiting family Sunday night to find I had no heat. Some background. I bought the home in 2016 from the previous owners who had lived here for 40 years. They had this heat pump unit installed in 2013. I've never done anything to the unit but change the filter every few months. This past Spring, I figured I should probably be doing more than I was and I bought a maintenance agreement with the company that installed the unit originally and they came out in April and said everything looked good. That's it, no report or anything just …looks good. Then in early July, the unit stopped cooling. I called them to come take a look and they said I was low on refrigerant and most likely had a leak, and the capacitor on the outdoor unit needed to be replaced. They said I was 3 lbs low and talked me into some leak sealant that they said could fix minor leaks. I paid their IMO exorbitant fees and the unit had been working fine since. Fast forward to Sunday evening when I returned home to find myself with no heat. I turned the unit off at the breaker and back on to hopefully reset it. Then I turned off the unit at the thermostat and back on. This resulted in the outside condenser starting but no air came out of the vents and the air handler did not start. I took the cover off of the air handler and did the same process again but with no luck. The air handler didn't work at all, not even a click to indicate it was trying to start. Once again turning the unit off at the breaker, I felt the fan casing and it was warm to the touch. I once again called the same company, because I have the maintenance agreement, and they came and spent about 20 minutes looking at it and said the fan motor was bad. They told me since the unit was so old a new one would have to be manufactured and would cost $4,073 and take 7-10 days to arrive. I called a second company and they came out today. Company #2 is highly respected, 5 star google review and recommended on Reddit. However, they sent a young man in his early 20's who didn't seem to have a lot of experience as he kept going outside to call someone. He told me the fan motor was bad also and almost word for word what the repairman said the day before that the fan was hard to spin and it shouldn't be that way. He actually removed the fan motor from the air handler and sat on the floor working on it for about an hour. This guy stated they could replace it with the exact same fan motor for $2,685 or a generic motor for $1,055. I opted for the generic not knowing how much longer I would get out of this unit. After going to get the motor and returning, he worked on it several more hours and couldn't get it to work. He finally told me 4 hours later, that the generic wasn't compatible with my unit and that it had a variable control fan and only a replica of the original would work and would also require the control board be replaced therefore the price would be $3,300.Better than company #1 but still yikes! At this point, I think my best option is to just replace everything with a new air handler and condenser because of the refrigerant leak from the summer and now this. He said that the leak may have been what caused the fan to fail but there was no way to test the charge since the unit wasn't working due to the fan motor being dead. He said finding and fixing a leak could be $3,000-5,000. Does any of this sound right to the experts out there?The current unit is a York YHJF30S41S1A. Do you have any recommendations for a replacement electric heat pump (air handler and condenser) for a 2200 sq ft 1979 built side split level in central Virginia? House is one level on one side built on an unconditioned crawl space and two levels on the other side built on a concrete slab at grade.Thanks for any advice!
Posted Nov 12, 2025, 1:52 AM UTC