Ice Accumulating inside Heat Pump

[Jd5996]

As I mentioned in a previous post I fired up my Rheem 5350 heat pump this morning for the first time. Let it run for 8hrs, pool temp increased about 2 degrees from 78 to 80 and so I even took a nice afternoon dip.

Thought everything was going great until I decided to turn it off for the day ( this was mostly a trial run as I have never used it before).

What I noticed is a whole bunch of ice covering some tubing or wiring (tough to tell) inside the unit.

I took some pics.

Is this normal?

Thanks, JD

 

[JoyfulNoise]

What is your air temp and humidity?

Remember, the heat pump is like an A/C running in reverse. The heat pump is removing heat from the air around it (cooling the local air) and transferring that heat to the pool. So the air around the compressor and evaporative coils is going to get really cold.

 

[Jd5996]

Temp was between 70(10am) and 75(5pm), well below normal as we have a cool front moving in. Humidity approx 62.

Im a little confused because all my searching shows a varying degree of opinions as to whether this is "normal" or not.

There is no sign of any malfuntion, no error codes, and as I mentioned the pool was warming up nicely. Was kind of shocked to see all that ice tbh

 

[Ted527]

Not sure if pool units do but a household heat pump will have defrost controls to periodically remove ice build up on coils.
It is common for them to frost up

 

[PoolGate]

Make sure the cooling fins are not excessively bent over and restricting cooling flow along with weeds and anything that covers the vents. This also can be a sign of low refrigerant. Have it checked and filled if needed. Since it is a closed system, if it is low, there is a leak.

 

[denniswiseman]

My heat pump ices up especially in colder weather but the auto defrost cuts in and it melts
The only problem is when the auto defrost fails and the ice builds up
If this is a new installation I would think it’s normal operation