Heat pumps was replaced in 2017. North Florida has had moderately cool weather (50-60 degrees F) recently. I noticed water underneath one of the units.
- Is the water pooling normal? If yes, why?
- If yes, What can be done about the water pooling?
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Heat Pumps are basically where you reverse the process of cooling in your HVAC. Normally your compressor takes the expanded hot refrigerant and runs it through the coils to cool it down, before sending it into the compressor, where it's compressed and piped into the blower, where it's allowed to expand (gasses cool as they expand) and become hot.
A heat pump reverses this process by sending the compressed refrigerant back through the coils. So your coils are expanding the gas and thus cooling the outside to bring heat inside. What you're seeing is the normal byproduct of this process: condensate. In many cases, this is actually a defrosting because the outside coils get pretty cold (and North Florida has been saturated with rain of late so humidity is quite high).
The only thing I could think of to control this would be to install a water heater pan underneath and pipe the condensate elsewhere. You'll need to probably build something else to hold the unit in place, since it's screwed to the pad.
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So to answer the question yes this is normal. Many times there is a drain hole on the outside unit we usually just let them drain on the ground, the condensate can be piped away but many times the drain line freezes in winter and the pan overflows this is hard on the unit because if the drain is frozen the pan fills up and freezes this can damage the unit.– Ed BealJan 7 '19 at 16:31