heat pump defrost circuit question, austin, texas?

Hello Jim:

The outdoor fan must run during the heating phase. Check the capacitor, lube the bearings.

to force a defrost, turn your thermostat from heating to cooling, and set the temperature 3 degrees cooler than your space. It will cool, pumping your heat out to the outdoor unit. this should thaw it in five to ten minutes.

If the unit is not defrosting, check the defrost thermostat (located near the distributor) and the time on the defrost timer board (set to minimum time).

Last thing to check would be refrigerant level.

In all likely hood your unit isn't going into defrost mode. Mine did exactly the same thing a couple of years ago and became a ice block too. There was a bad defrost circuit board in mine that had to be replaced and it has worked fine ever since. You'll need to have this looked at an corrected by a qualified person or it's only gonna get worse.

Here is a great video that explains how to replace the defrost board. He talks about his unit becoming a block of ice like you described too. You can easily do this yourself too. If this unit is nothing at all like yours just search YouTube some until you find a similar unit. But this will give you the basics and you can probably figure it out from there. This will save you a ton of cash if you can do it yourself.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAc5UanN9h8

Here is a link to a search I did on YouTube for heat pump defrost mode where you can learn more about this issue. http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=heat%2...

Good luck to you and I hope this is helpful!