HVAC Repair in Benton, AR
Homes here need heat from November through March and cooling from May through September. If your system quits, tell us what it's doing and a licensed contractor who covers Saline County will get in touch.
Tell us about the job
It takes about a minute.
Ten months of work a year, with hard swings between
Benton only gets a couple of months of rest. Heat runs November through March, and the system switches over to cooling by May. That leaves ten months where either the furnace or the air conditioner has to work, and only a short window in spring and fall where neither one does.
Winter nights averaging 33°F mean the furnace is cycling on and off most of the night, all winter. Electric heat is common here, and the wear from that cycling shows up in the parts that switch it on and off. Summer afternoons averaging 90°F push the air conditioner just as hard from the other direction, running long stretches to hold the house steady. Saline County has also logged 70 damaging wind events and 11 winter storms over the past ten years, and with 24% of Arkansas households losing power for a full day or more in 2024, a system that already runs hard through the extremes sometimes has to restart cold after an outage too.
- 5 months
- November through March, your system heats
- 5 months
- May through September, it cools
- 33°F
- the average winter night it heats against
- 90°F
- the average summer afternoon it cools against
NOAA nClimDiv, 1991–2020 normals
Arkansas requires HVAC contractors to hold a state license.
The license is held by the contractor, not issued job by job. It is the company or individual you hire that Arkansas has tested and put on record, not the specific repair being done. Because the state handles this, counties and cities in Arkansas cannot add their own HVAC license requirement on top of it, so the same state license applies no matter where in Saline County the work is happening.
For a repair like this, that state license is what stands behind the person working on your system. If gas lines are part of the job, the connection is the part that has to be right, since that is where a leak would start.
Source: Arkansas Department of Labor and Licensing
- Why is my heat not working?
- Start with the thermostat. Make sure it is set to heat and set a few degrees above the room temperature, and check that it has power if it uses batteries. If the thermostat looks right, check your breaker panel for a tripped breaker, since a furnace on a dead circuit will not respond to anything. If power and settings check out and the furnace still will not run, the igniter or a safety switch may be at fault, and that is a job for a licensed contractor to test.
- Why is my system running but not cooling the house?
- Check the air filter first. A filter clogged with dust blocks airflow across the indoor coil, and when air cannot move past it the coil can ice over and stop cooling the air at all. Next look at the outdoor unit and clear away any leaves, grass clippings or debris packed against it, since it needs open airflow to release heat. If the filter is clean and the outdoor unit is clear and the house still is not cooling, the system is likely low on refrigerant or has an electrical fault, and that needs a licensed contractor with gauges to diagnose.
- What can I check before calling for HVAC repair?
- Check the thermostat settings and batteries, then check your breaker panel for anything tripped. Look at the air filter and replace it if it is gray or clogged, since restricted airflow causes both heating and cooling problems. For a furnace, make sure the switch that looks like a light switch near the unit is on, since that shuts the whole system off if flipped. If everything there looks normal and the system still is not working right, a licensed contractor will need to look at it directly.